Episodios
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Fast food is part of American life. As much a part of our background as the sky and the clouds. But it wasn't always that way, and over the decades, the fast food landscape has changed in quite profound ways. Race is a key part of that picture. A landmark exploration of this has been published by today's guest, Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Her book, recently published, is entitled White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food From Black Exclusion to Exploitation. The book has been received very positively by the field. And was recently named the best book in the field of urban affairs by the Urban Affairs Association.
Interview Summary
I was so happy to see your book because people have talked about the issue of race off and on in the field, but to see this kind of scholarly treatment of it like you provided has been really a welcome addition. Let me start with a general question. Let's begin with the fast food situation today and then rewind to where it began. Are there patterns to where fast food restaurants are located and who fast food is marketed to?
Absolutely. There's quite a bit of research, and you just alluded to the work that's been done in the field. There's a lot of research that shows fast food is most dense in African American communities. Not every study has the same finding, but overall that's what the accumulated evidence shows. On the one hand you have the fact that Black communities are disproportionately saturated with these outlets. Then there's also the case that apart from the physical locations of the restaurants, fast food is strongly racialized as Black in terms of how it's portrayed to the public. It [Fast Food] relies on images of Blackness and Black cultural productions such as Black music for its marketing. These sometimes these veer into racial caricature as well. One of the things I talked about in the book briefly is the TV commercial character Annie who Popeye's introduced in 2009. They basically created this Black woman that Adweek at the time was calling "feisty," but it's really just this stereotypical idea of the sassy Black woman and she's in the kitchen frying up the chicken for Popeye's. And actually, some of the language that was used in those commercials really evokes the copy on late 19th century and Aunt Jemima pancake mix packaging. It's a really strong departure from fast food's early days, the way that fast food is now relying on Blackness as part of its core marketing constructs.
I'm assuming that it follows from what you've been saying that the African American community has disproportionately been targeted with the marketing of these foods. Is that true of children within that community?
Research shows that in terms of fast food marketing at the point of purchase. There's more - display advertising for example at restaurants that are in Black communities. And then there's also been research to show, not in terms of the outlets themselves, but in terms of TV programming that there tends to be more commercials for fast food and other unhealthy foods during shows that are targeting Black youth.
How much of the patterning of the fast food restaurants is due to income or due to the amount of fast food consumption in these areas with many restaurants?
Almost none of it really. It's not income and it's not the amount of fast food that people are consuming. In fact, one of the main studies that led me to start researching this book, because I was coming to it from public health where there was a lot of research around the disproportionality of fast food restaurants. We actually did a study in New York City, some colleagues and we published it in 2009, where we looked at how fast food was distributed across New York City's five boroughs. And restaurant density, we found, was due almost entirely to racial demographics. There's very little contribution from income. So, the percentage of Black residents was what was driving it. That was the biggest predictor of where fast food was located. It wasn't income, income made very little contribution and if you compared Black neighborhoods that were higher in income to those that were lower in income, they basically had about as much fast food exposure. Then if you compare them to white neighborhoods matched in income, Black neighborhoods still had more. So, it wasn't income, it was race. There are other areas that were high in fast food density like Midtown and downtown Manhattan where you have commercial and business districts, transportation hubs, tourist destinations. So, you expect fast food to be in these really dense and kind of busy commercial areas, but the only residential space that had comparable density were Black and brown neighborhoods. The assumption that many people have is that, okay, well if it's not income, then it's probably demand. So probably fast food is just dense in those neighborhoods because Black people eat so much fast food. But again, the data do not bear that out, not just in our study, but in others. And in fact, apart from the study we did specifically on fast food, we did another study where we looked at retail redlining for a number of different kinds of retail sectors. And again, demand is not what situates, you know, where stores are or are not. And then when I got to this project, just digging through the archives, you find that until the industry really went in on targeted advertising to increase the numbers of visits that Black people were making to fast food restaurants and the average check size that they were spending, Black consumers were mostly using fast food as a quick snack, it wasn't a primary place for meals. So it's really the case that the restaurants proceeded the demand and not the inverse.
It is an absolutely fascinating picture. My guess is that what you've just said will probably come as a surprise to some people who are listening to this, not that fast food isn't dense in particular neighborhoods, but that it's particularly dense in neighborhoods by race just because people generally think that fast food is popular everywhere. So, let's talk about why this occurred and dive a little more deeply into what your book does and that's to provide a historical view on how and why this evolved. So, what did the early history look like and then what happened?
So, the book traces what's basically a national story, but I focus particularly on certain cities like Chicago, New York and DC. But it's tracing how fast food changed racially and spatially from the early 1900's to the present. I break out that early history into what I call first and second-generation chains. So, they opened in urban and suburban areas respectively. The birth of the first generation fast food restaurants took place in what is termed the Nader of race relations in the US from the end of the Civil War to the 1930s. So, this is a time during which you see Plessy versus Ferguson, for example, ushering in legal segregation. Lynchings are at their worst. You have the destruction of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's taking place and other notable incidents and forces that were undermining Black life at the time. It's during that context that the first generation restaurants are born. And so, these are burger chains like White Castle, that was the first actually big burger chain. People often assume it's McDonald's, but it's actually White Castle in 1921. And then there are knockoffs of White Castle, like White Tower and Little Tavern, which was an East coast brand. And then there were also other restaurants that were not burger chains, but more like hot shops was more of a sit-down restaurant. And then you had Horn and Hardart, the outlets where they had auto mats. So, you know, this was kind of high tech at the time, but you would go in and the food was behind little glass compartments and you would put in your requisite number of nickels and then take out your little plate of food. These were all the restaurants that I'm calling first generation restaurants. So, you had quite a bit of diversity in terms of what they were serving, but they were all in urban centers. They were not franchised. They were corporate owned outlets and most importantly everything about them was white, whether figuratively in terms of who dined and worked there or literally in the architecture and the design and the name like White Castle. That veneer of whiteness was doing two things. On the one hand, trying to offer the promise of pristine sanitary conditions because this is a time when food production was rife with concerns. And then also it's trying to promise a kind of unsullied social whiteness in the dining experience. So, first generation then leads to second generation fast food, which begins in the suburbs instead of the urban centers. Second generation fast food starts to grow in the early 1950s. These are the brand names that are most synonymous with fast food today: KFC, Burger King, McDonald's. So, for example, Ray Crock launches McDonald's as a franchise in the all white suburb of Des Plaines outside Chicago near O'Hare airport. And he set to fly over prospective sites looking for church steeples and schools, which to him were an indication of a middle class and stable community, but of course, racializing that as white. Because you could have Black neighborhoods with church steeples, but that was not where the restaurants were going. So, what ends up happening with second generation fast food is that it takes this theme of purity and shifts so that it's not just the purity of simple kind of fuel for the working man, but instead the purity of white domestic space. And where first-generation restaurants targeted working adults, the second went after families and children. Fast food then becomes more than just food - it's about fun. Those are the two key ways to think about the early history.
One could obviously find many, many, many examples of different racial groups being excluded from the economic mainstream of the country. For example, areas of employment, and my guess is that being excluded from the marketing applied to consumer goods and lots of other things. But do you think there's something special about food in this context?
Oh, that's a good question. It's interesting because fast food. It's food, but it's more than that the way that fast food initially excluded Black people. One of the things I talk about in the early part of the book is James Baldwin going to a restaurant and trying to order a burger and being rejected and facing discrimination. And the idea that it's not just that you can't get a burger, it's not the same thing as if you try to buy, I don't know, a ham sandwich or something. But like what burger means something more than that, right? It's bigger than a burger is Ella Baker said. Fast food is kind of like the closest thing we have to a national meal. It sort of occupies a special place in the heart of America and is symbolic of this quintessential all-American meal. And the notions of a good and simple life that we purportedly have in this country. So, it means more I think the way that fast food was positioned as something that was totally wrapped up in this exclusionary whiteness.
Your book traces the long pathway that fast food traveled going from exclusion in the beginning and then later exploitation. Can you describe a couple of the key turning points?
Well I would say that it wasn't like a light sort of got switched on that caused fast food to shift abruptly from utterly excluding Black people to then pursuing them full throttle the next day. It was quite a long and bumpy pathway and really American retailers in general have continually had to discover Black consumers and the fact that they exist over and over. And then sort of trying to think like, oh, how do we reach them? We don't understand them, like they're this enigma kind of thing. Fast food was doing the same kind of thing. There was both what the industry was doing and then there were also pull factors that were causing fast food to be drawn into Black communities as well. There are a lot of turning points, but I would say if you start fairly early in the history, a key one was after second generation fast food got going. Where suburban fast food right, is trying to position itself as this white utopia. But almost immediately that notion was fraught and unstable because concerns quickly arose around teenagers. They were money makers but they were also rowdy. Their behavior, hot rodding and goofing off in the parking lot and so on, was off-putting to the adult diners. So, it became this difficult kind of needle to thread of like how are we going to track this consumer segment that's foundational to the enterprise but do so under conditions that would keep them in line and not mess up the other potential revenue that we have going. As the kind of nuisance of fast foods became more pitched, municipalities began introducing ordinances to control fast food or even ban it. And that made the suburbs harder to get into or to maintain a foothold in. Corporations then start looking more at the cities that they were avoiding in the first place and the Black communities there that they had excluded. So that happens fairly early and then some other key turning points occur throughout the 1960s. Here we have urban renewal, you have urban rebellions taking place and during the late 1960s when these rebellions and uprisings were taking place, this is the time period when you get the first Black franchisees. Into the 1970s you have oil crises, then you have the burger and chicken wars as the industry called them in the 1980s. And this was referring to corporations battling each other for market share. So, all throughout the history there were different turning points that either accelerated the proliferation of fast food or sort of change the way the industry was looking at Black consumers and so on.
Now in some discussions I've heard of this issue off and on over the years from people who have looked at the issue of targeted marketing who have talked about how there was a period of time and you made this clear, when Blacks were excluded from the marketing and they just weren't part of the overall picture of these restaurants. Then there was a movement for Blacks to be included more in the mainstream of American culture so that it was almost seen as an advance when they became included in the marketing. Black individuals were shown in the marketing and part of the iconic part of these restaurants. So that was seen as somewhat of a victory. What do you think of that?
It's true and not true. I mean when fast food decided to finally start actually representing Black people in its marketing, I think that is important. I do think that the fact that they were finally making ads and conceiving of campaigns that saw Black people as part of the actual consumer base at which they were, yes, that that is important. But it's also the case that corporations are never doing anything for altruism. It's because they wanted to shore up their bottom line. So, for example, Burrell Advertising is the biggest African American ad shop based in Chicago. They get the McDonald's account and so they're the first ones to have a fast food restaurant account. They begin their campaign in 1971 and at that time, their advertising actually positioned Black families as regular people doing everything everybody else does and going to the restaurant and enjoying time together as a family and so on. And I think those kinds of images were important that they were creating them, but again, at the same time it was only the context in which Burrell got that account. The reasons why McDonald's was reaching out to Black consumers was because, again, in the early 1970s white suburbs were becoming more saturated, and McDonald's needing to expand. Then you have the oil crisis in which people are not driving as much, and Black people because of racism are centered in urban centers and not in the suburbs. So that makes a logical place for them to go and so on. So, it's not without its vexed context that those new advertising images and opportunities were taking place.
Okay, thanks. I know that's a complicated topic, so I appreciate you addressing that. You know, something you mentioned just a few moments ago was that when Blacks started to become owners of franchises, can you expand on that a little bit and say what was the significance?
Yes. First of all, cities were changing at that time. White residents were moving to the suburbs, multiple public and private policies were keeping the suburbs white and white residents were moving to white suburbs. So, Central City was changing, right? The neighborhoods that had been white before were now changing to become predominantly Black. And so, the fast food outlets that were located in those neighborhoods found their client base changing around them. And many of those operators, and indeed their corporate superiors, were uninterested in and uninformed about a Black consumer base at best and outwardly hostile at worst. You end up with as neighborhood racial transitions are taking place, white operators are now in communities they never meant to serve. Som as urban uprisings rack one city after another, Black franchisees are brought on kind of as a public face in these changing urban areas. The primary goal was to really have Black franchisees manage the racial risks that corporate was finding untenable. They realized that it wouldn't do to have white managers or franchise owners in these neighborhoods. So, they bring in Black franchisees to start making that transition. And then after fast food becomes more interested in trying to deliberately capture more Black spending, Black franchisees become even more important in that regard. For their part, the Black franchisees were seeking out fast food outlets as a financial instrument, right? This was a way to contest and break down unfair and pervasive exclusion from the country's resources. So, it was never about how much fast food we can possibly eat, right? Again, with the demand issue. So, Black franchisees are basically trying to get their part of the pie and then the federal government is heavily involved at this point because they start creating these different minority enterprise initiatives to grow Black small business. And so, it wasn't only the Black franchisees, but also Black franchisors who were starting their own chains. So, for example, former NFL Player Brady Keys started All Pro Chicken, as just one example. So, this idea of expanding fast food franchising to Black entrepreneurs who had been shut out on its face, seems like a laudable initiative. But again, it's like this is not just altruism and also the way that franchises were positioned in this kind of like you can get into business and do so in a way that's low risk because you know you don't have to start from scratch. You're buying into a thriving concern with name recognition and corporate support and all that. And all of that sounds good except you realize that in fact the franchisees are the ones who have to bear all the risk, not corporate. That's what the government was doing in terms of trying to put in all this money into franchising is really. It's like that's the response to the real life and death failures, for example, around policing, which was always at the heart of these uprisings. You have these real life and death concerns and then the government's responding with giving people access to fried chicken and burger outlets, which nobody was asking for really. Not only was the method problematic, but the execution as well. Just because Black people had more access to the franchises doesn't mean that the rest of the racism that was present, suddenly disappeared, right? The theoretical safety of a franchise didn't bear out in practice. Because of course they still couldn't get access to credit from lending institutions to launch their restaurants because they still didn't get support they needed from corporate, which in fact there are still lawsuits to this day by Black franchisees because the communities in which they're operating were still contending with deep inequality. All of that meant that that whole project was not likely to work very well. And you know, it's no surprise that it didn't.
You mentioned chicken several times. In fact, there's a chapter in your book entitled Criminal Chickens. Can you tell us more?
Yes, Criminal chicken is towards the end of the book. So, the book is organized in three parts. Part one is white utopias, part two is racial turnover, and part three is Black catastrophe. In each of those you see how Blackness is problematic, but in different ways. So Criminal Chicken is really dealing with the fact that by the 1990s, fast food had become pervasive in Black space and was thoroughly racialized as Black. And so, since fast food has saturated these neighborhoods, of course Black residents began to consume it more. With that, a program reigns down from the dominant society over Black people's alleged failure to control themselves and an assumed deviant predilection for unhealthy dietary behaviors, whether fast food, but also the same kind of discourse circulated around soul food. And the tenor of the discourse really raises W.E.B. DuBois's age-old question, which is how does it feel to be a problem? That was really the tenor of the conversation around fast food at that time. The chapters about the ways in which Black people's consumption was frequently characterized as deviant and interrogating the paradoxes around the symbolic meanings of fast food. Because like what we talked about earlier, Black people are basically being criticized for eating something that's supposedly at the heart of Americana. It's a kind of a no-win situation. On the one hand, certainly overseas, fast food continues to enjoy this kind of iconic status of America and American Burger and so on. Even within the country's borders it still retains some of that allure as something emblematic of American culture. But it's also now more fraught because, you know, we're in a moment where local and organic foods and so on are held in high esteem and fast food is the antithesis of that and it's industrial and mass produced and homogenized and has all these nutritional liabilities. So, basically, it's looking at the changing ideas around fast food and race and how that intersected with Black consumption.
That's so interesting. I'd like to wrap up with a question, but I'd like to lead into that by reading two quotes from your book that I think are especially interesting. Here's the first. It is painfully logical that Black communities would first be excluded from a neighborhood resource when it was desirable and then become a repository once it was shunned. And then the second quote is this. The story of fast foods relationship to Black folks is a story about America itself. So, here's the question, are there ways that you can think of that fast food and food systems could be reconceptualized to help address issues of justice and equity?
I would say that addressing justice inequity in food systems of which fast food is a part, is really about dealing with the other systems that govern our daily lives. Meaning, it's not an issue of trying to fix fast food, right? So, that is a discreet industry it behaves more equitably with communities because what it has done over the history that I trace in the book is it's not so unique in its practices and it also can't have taken the trajectory it did without intersecting with other institutional concerns. So, for example, housing is instructive because you know, of course you can't exploitatively target Black consumers unless residential segregation exists to concentrate them in space. And to do that, obviously you need a lot of different institutional policies and practices at play to produce that. And in a similar way, housing went from exclusion in the form of rank discrimination, resource hoarding, redlining, the denial of mortgages, all of that, to exploitation in the form of subprime lending. And Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks about predatory inclusion and I type that in the book because I think it's also a useful way to think about fast food as well. So, if you're thinking about equity in food systems, then you have to think about why is it that resources including food, but also beyond food, in this country are distributed the way that they are. And I think you can't get at the issues of justice that play out for fast food or injustice without addressing the key issues that reverberate through it. And so that's false scarcities that are created by capitalism, the racism that undergirds urban policies around land use, around segregation, deeply ingrained ideas in the American psyche about race and but also about other things. So, for me really, reconceptualizing fast food is really reconceptualizing how we live in America.
Bio
Naa Oyo A. Kwate is Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers. A psychologist by training, she has wide ranging interests in racial inequality and African American health. Her research has centered primarily on the ways in which urban built environments reflect racial inequalities in the United States, and how racism directly and indirectly affects African American health. Kwate’s research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Prior to her first major book, White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation, she published the short work Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now, which examines restaurants that deploy unapologetically racist logos, themes, and architecture; and edited The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality, a visual taxonomy of inequality using Camden, NJ as a case study. Kwate has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library, and has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the European Institutes for Advanced Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a book investigating the impact of corner liquor stores in Black communities from 1950 to date.
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A growing number of research studies show that the cognitive and brain development of low-income children differs from that of children in higher income families. For any family, that is a concerning statement. Today's podcast features a project called Baby's First Years, a multi-year effort to test the connections between poverty reduction and brain development among very young children. Here to talk about what the study has revealed so far is Dr. Lisa Gennetian from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin from the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Transcript
Sarah, let's start with you. What is the Baby's First Years study?
Sarah - So the Baby's First Years study is a study of how having additional income matters for children's development and for family life in families that had incomes around the federal poverty line when they had a child. And so, it includes two main components. The first is a randomized control trial that tests the effects of families receiving either a large or a small monthly cash gift each month, families get either $333 or $20 each month on a debit card from the time their child was born until just after the child's sixth birthday. Lisa and our colleagues, Katherine Magnuson, Kimberly Noble, Greg Duncan, Hiro Yoshikawa, and Nathan Fox lead this part of the study. They've been following mothers and children from a thousand families over the past six years. The other part of the study is a qualitative study in which we do in-depth interviews with a subset of those families because we want to learn more about how they think, about making financial decisions, the values and dreams for their children that guide their parenting and how they think about their money they're getting from Baby's First Years each month.
This study is complex and would require time to observe change. Can you tell me about the length of time your team has been doing this intervention?
Sarah - So the first families started the study in 2018.
Lisa - One thing that's unique about this intervention is its length. As Sarah mentioned, it's starts at the time of birth and it's monthly. And families will be receiving this cash for 76 months. So, they'll be receiving it through the first six years of their child's life.
Thank you for that detail. Lisa, what is the landscape for food programs and assistance in the United States, particularly for families with infants and young children?
Lisa - There are two major programs that are federally funded in the US that are particularly targeted for families with infants and children. One of them is called the Women, Infant, and Children's Program, or WIC for short. The WIC program, let's see, in 2022, served about 6.3 million participants, but it provides a mix of core nutritional needs, breastfeeding support, information and referrals. And the second big safety net program in the US around food is called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This one's broader and has served over 40 million people in 2022. And together both these programs have been pretty core to providing food and nutritional support to families, including those with young children.
Thanks for that context. So now, how does the cash gift intervention differ from, or fit with other food assistance programs that these families may participate in?
Lisa - The thing that cash can add above and beyond that, so thinking about how this Baby's First Year study might help supplement resources is in two ways. One is thinking about how money that might have been spent on the foods that are provided by these programs are now being taken care of through these food subsidies. One direct way that the BFY cash money can help is by increasing those net resources available for other types of food or for other things in the household. It's a real compliment to these what we call in kind or conditioned kind of food subsidy programs. The second is that there are no conditions. And so, what WIC and SNAP provide, which is really formative and really important for a lot of families, is also has some real parameters on what could be purchased. And so having extra cash means sort more flexibility around direct food resources. And that's actually something we start to see a little bit in the Baby's First Year study.
Wow, Lisa, thank you for that. Given that these are means-tested programs, the cash infusion from Baby's First Year's project could influence participants' eligibility for other programs, right? How did you deal with that?
Lisa - Oh yes, it's a really great question. Thanks for asking that. For the purposes of this study, we, for several years, worked closely with all layers of government, federal, state, and local to think hard about how to protect the families receiving this cash gift from losing eligibility for these other programs because as you say, right, we're increasing their income implicitly through this cash gift. And so, we did that through some administrative rulings, meaning states agreed that the families would be exempt and to the states, we had legislation passed to protect these families from their eligibility being affected by receipt of the cash gift. We did that as comprehensively as possible. There are some exceptions, but we think that it's been pretty effective kind of strategy we use to ensure that families, when they get this cash gift, that they're not mechanically losing eligibility for these other programs. So, the way to think about this cash and supplementing people's lives and supplementing and accompanying everything else, is also helping how families might think about access to these other programs and choices around that in ways that they might not have had before.
That sounds like a large undertaking, and it took extensive planning to get to that point. I imagine you wouldn't want families to lose their benefits because they participated in this study. Sarah, I want to come back to you. What are families’ experiences with Baby's First Year and with government-provided food assistance programs in the United States?
Sarah - So families in both gift groups are appreciative of having extra money every month. That's even more so the case for those in the high gift group mothers not surprisingly, some mothers in Baby's First Year struggle to make ends meet, for others, even if they can cover their bills every month, having just that little bit extra breathing room is pretty welcome. Like Lisa was talking about across the country, in Baby's First Years, the vast majority of families have experience with food assistance programs, either currently or in the past. It's pretty rare for them not to, relatively speaking, while families often receive WIC, that's the Women, Infants and Children program that Lisa mentioned, when they have babies, many stop getting WIC after their babies turn one, despite the fact that they remain income eligible for that. Most families also receive some benefits from SNAP. And in some qualitative work that I did with my colleagues, Carolyn Barnes and Jill Hoiding, we heard from families about how they thought about engaging with the WIC program. They thought about the value of the benefits they could get from doing so, but also the costs of doing that, like how hard it is to make it to appointments, to fill out the paperwork to use those benefits once you're at the grocery store. And they weighed those costs and benefits as their children grew up when they were thinking about whether or not to pursue those benefits.
So Lisa, what are you learning from the Baby's First Year study about where and how families and children are getting food?
Lisa - So Sarah has talked about the richness of speaking to moms directly at holistic types of interviews. Alongside that, we've annually been going back and speaking to mothers and collecting information about them and their children. And part of our, so these are our annual surveys, they are in or near the children's birthdate, and we ask them a bunch of questions about how life is going, about their spending, what's happening with income and employment and childcare, their own health, their mental health. One of the areas that we focus on is around food. And one of those food items is called a food security scale. This is a six item, a USDA-approved scale. It asks questions like not having enough money to buy food, questions about hunger, questions about eating balanced meals. It includes a set of items that we would call pretty subjective. For example, the question on balanced meals, but also less subjective. Is there literally enough money to buy enough food for the household? And so, we're learning some really interesting things. First, we're learning that there is very high connection to this food safety net that we were just talking about. So, far majority of the families are connected either to WIC or the food assistance program called SNAP. And that's pretty consistent. Sarah just talked about a little bit of the drop off of WIC, but we certainly see consistent connections to SNAP, all the way through the first three years of the child's life. We see that generally as sort of a kind of good news story. So, these are families who are eligible for these programs, their family's drawn from four very different dates and sites. They're very diverse in their racial ethnic composition and whether they've been born or not in the US in terms of the moms. The fact that there is very high connection to a food safety net system while raising young children, we think is a really positive signal of the food safety net system potentially working pretty well. And then we're not seeing big differences between the high cash gift group and the low cash gift group on this food security measure. In fact, we're seeing pretty high food security amongst these families with very young children on the scale. That doesn't mean that any one of these items, we're not seeing high reports of things like scarcity. So even though the families are very low in food insecurity, we do see that about a third of them are reporting some kind of food scarcity. So, 31% report that the food they bought did not last and they sometimes often didn't have money to get more. For example, we're also hearing from families, they're relying on free meals from non-federal sources. We haven't talked yet about the importance of the faith-based kind of system and support and informal networks in providing food. We ask families this when their children were about three years old, and roughly 10% report some receipt of free meals from other sources. We are inevitably also seeing, as you might expect, some variation across these sites. So that's sort of a hint on what we're seeing around food security and connections to the safety net. We also ask about spending, and we're not seeing overall differences in how much money is being spent on food with one very interesting exception. That's on money, on food spent eating out. We don't ask a whole bunch of information about nutrition, but when the children were toddlers, moms do report, who are receiving the high cash gift, they do report higher consumption of fruits and vegetables among their toddlers. It is a very sort of unique and narrow question, but positive, so more fruits and vegetables and not more of other things like salty treats, flavored drinks, sodas, sugary sweets. And we're looking forward to continuing to follow up on items of nutrition when the children are four.
This is fascinating, and I'm so grateful that your team is paying attention to these families' experiences and engagement with the social safety net and the charitable food sector. Sarah, we often understand food, particularly healthy food, as a way to deliver nutrition that promotes health and development. Of course, food provides much more than nutrition. What, if anything, are you learning from the study about the social meaning of food and what it represents to families?
Sarah - I really appreciate this question because it's something we've been looking at and thinking about a lot in our research, in the research other people have done before, and in our own study we really hear a lot about the role that food plays in families, beyond nutrition. In so many cultures, food plays a really core role in social time and in family time. This can be things like turning family movie night into something a little more special by microwaving popcorn. It can be having special mom and me time with mom taking a child out to go get a cake pop at a coffee shop. It can be eating a meal at a sit-down restaurant to celebrate a special occasion, a child's middle school graduation, for some of these purchases, you can't use food assistance. And so having cash on hand is really essential to engaging in these kinds of special rituals and family time. Like your question implies, it turns our attention to the role that food plays in family bonding and in socializing. We really want to think about the multiple roles that food serves in our lives and how having this kind of extra income on hand for families who are often income constrained, can change these opportunities for those special family times around food.
Bios
Dr. Lisa Gennetian is an applied economist, Professor of Public Policy, and the Pritzker Professor of Early Learning Policy Studies at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Drawing on perspectives from the behavioral sciences, psychology, and child development, her research focuses on the economics of child development, specifically child poverty, parent engagement and decision making, and policy and social investment considerations.
Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin is Vaughn Bascom Professor of Children, Family, and Community in the School of Human Ecology and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty. She is a sociologist whose research focuses on family, adolescence, social policy and the welfare state, class and inequality, and qualitative methods. Her current research includes examining the role of parents’ churning (on-again/off-again) relationships in family life, exploring the experiences and financial decision-making of mothers who are receiving monthly unconditional cash gifts, and understanding how rural men make ends meet, spend their time, and make meaning while disconnected from the formal labor force.
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Today's podcast is a story of one man's personal journey to making a difference by building communities. Zach Wyatt grew up caretaking an old 300-acre farm in Virginia. He went to college and ended up working in mortgage lending. And then something changed for Zack, and that's where the story gets interesting. He now leads the Carolina Farm Trust, working to strengthen local food systems in the Carolinas. The trust cultivates urban farm networks, farm apprenticeships, supports local farmers in purchasing equipment or land, making informed-decisions, and more.
Interview Summary
I'd like to understand a little bit more, why did you want to start the Carolina Farm Trust?
Well, with a lot of things, it was just kind of by accident and circumstance. And I would say subconsciously I had agriculture in my bones, ever since I was a kid growing up in agriculture in Northern Virginia. It just kind of seeps in. We [The Family] still have that little arm reached out to being a part the DC metro area. Growing up in an urban-rural environment kind of planted, I think, a lot of the seeds in the work that was going to transpire so many decades later. But it really just kind of came down to a life event. I had a partnership that just ended in one day, which was a huge blow to us financially. We had to get on EBT and Snap and went through that process. And I was really soul searching and figuring out what were the next steps for me. Looking back on it, I think I was really grasping on to how do I do anything, to kind of just do something. I got back into reading about our food system and farms and started meeting some farmers. And once you start talking to farmers in a real way and understanding what our food system truly is, it's horrifying. It kind of came down to seeing this visual metaphor of a meteorite heading toward us every day, and either sticking your head in the sand or doing something. Circumstance just led to this next event and next event, and the next event. And eight years later, here we are.
What I hear from you is this story of resiliency and it seems like that's something you also see in the food system or a need for that is that a fair assessment?Absolutely. We just take food in agriculture for granted. And over the last 80 to 90 years, we've really given our entire means of survival pretty much away. Most people don't really look at food and agriculture and how it spins every major decision on Earth. Every social problem we typically have, every health issue we have, if you follow it all the way down to where that problem started, you go all the way back to the dirt. So, to kind of look at resilience and what do we mean by that and more importantly, building regional resilience in a global economy: I think getting supply chains a whole lot shorter, focusing on soil health and nutrition density and our farming community, is where we really have to start.
I'm starting to get a sense of the big picture of the farm trust. What is the driving mission of your work? I think you're hitting on some of that, but I'd like to hear more.
I'd say the vision is very clearly about building regional resilience and then using food and agriculture as a primary driver. The four main pillars we have are health and nutrition, upward mobility and equity, sustainability, and climate change. Our four action-on-the-ground pillars are first, building an urban farm network and to get people to understand where our food comes from. Why is that important? We do really need to push urban centers to be more responsible for where our food comes from and playing a role in that. Second, our farm apprentice program, workforce development. You know, the average age of our farming community right now is a little over 60. Where is this next generation of farmers coming from? Where is the land coming from? So, it is not only kind of a labor force for us, you know, but how do we make sure every community garden, every school garden is thriving? How do we create teams that can go help our rural farming community with different projects or step in when someone gets sick or an emergency? Third, when we think of food as health, what does that really mean? If we're talking about food as medicine, in my opinion, we've already missed the boat. We got to talk about food as health, we got to talk about prevention. How do community health workers get out in communities covering geographic locations, really understanding what those needs are and how do we create systems to go meet them where they are. And then our fourth pillar is our distribution platform, which is really there to give a profitable revenue stream to our farming community. How do we use economics to really push them to start their regenerative farming journey? And then how internally to create supply chains that not only can work with consumers, you know, up and down the socioeconomic ladder, but how do we make sure we can build supply chains for larger institutions to be able to participate in a local food economy because the infrastructure is just not there.
I was struck by your earlier comment of if you get down to the, if you will, root cause of any problem, and forgive the pun, it seems like it's in the dirt. Right? And I'd like to hear you explain a little bit more about what you believe is what's wrong with the food system as it is today. And I got a sense it's about the lack of being local, but I want to hear it in your words and how does this guide your actions now?Well, it's just evolution. I mean we always try to get better. We wanted to make food cheaper, so we went from hundreds of farms and rapid consolidation over the years. We have processed and now ultra-processed food, and we have to deal with slavery and reconstruction and everything that kind of came with it with such as sharecropping from a social standpoint. We're looking at nutrition density and in average produce and protein sources we're almost 30 to 6% less than what it was 100 years ago. We're looking at climate change, sustainability. Where does that come from? Look at the carbon footprint, our agriculture industry puts on the planet, look at the massive consolidation of looking at if the world gets 40% of its grain from Ukraine, and then having different political and social issues come up. I include inflation spikes. We're looking at carbon sequestration, we're looking at no-till, we're looking at all these big environmental and all these sustainability and allergies and cancers. And so, where does all that come from? It comes from our environment. Looking through all of this, you can very much see parallels of how our food system started to consolidate and get more aggregated with all the other problems I just mentioned. And if you look at 1930, 1940, and then going from there, you can very much see kind of a parallel with a lot of the challenges that we face. So, I think we really spent a lot of time trying to kind of cherry pick among all these really big problems. We're trying to cherry pick smaller problems because they seem a little bit more manageable, but we really have to go rethink the system as a whole. And that's really, really hard to do. What we're really trying to push forward is how do we just look at a region, because I really feel like you have to do this from a regional perspective. How do we get a regional model to work, really go rebuild all that infrastructure, get, buy-in, understanding what the data's telling us, and then we can replicate that going forward to really other regions around the world.
This is very helpful and I appreciate the way you approach that question. Seeing that there are these large global issues and there are structural challenges when we talk about agriculture - and you're working in the region, my understanding, you're out of West Charlotte - and there's a distribution center. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing in West Charlotte, especially through this distribution center?
It became very clear that our farming community needed a market. Farmer's markets are tough. As consumers, some of us love them, some of us don't pay attention to them. But for our farming community, farmer's markets are really hard. And from a wholesale standpoint, it's very hard for Carolina farmers to compete with Mexico, California, Florida. How do you compete regionally on a global market? So, we had a distribution model planned for a while and in my head, I wanted it to be in West Charlotte and it needed to be near I-85. We wanted it to be in a community because this kind of distribution facility would be an employment place and we would have a real retail concept. We wanted a meat processing butchery component. So, it was kind of putting a lot of pie in the sky visions into one parcel. But one of our strategic advisors in 2021 was at coffee, talking to a friend about Carolina Farm Trust and kind of what our needs were. One of them said, "Oh, my family has this warehouse," So we took a look at it, and it met every criterion we could have dreamed of. The only thing that was different was that I was thinking in my head we would want like 100,000, 200,000 square feet and this one was 25,000 square feet. But the moment I looked at it, I realized this is the exact size or the range that we need because of the community impact. We want more of these not one or two, you know, that are gathered around. This being in the community was such a key factor to it. So, with our wholesale operation, our commercial kitchen, the retail, the event space, the meat processing butchery component of it all, we really could start to see this framework of getting kind of an independent food system together. So, we're working on phase one, which is our wholesale operation and our 3000 square foot commercial which should come online, you know, in the next six weeks. And then we're just waiting on permitting for phase two and fundraising on phase two to get that activated. It's a really cool project and we're really excited to see it to come to fruition here in the next few weeks.
This is really fascinating. You know, I haven't asked this, but I'm intrigued. Tell me a little bit about the farmers that you work with. What kinds of produce or crops are they or animals are they producing? I mean, how are you developing those relationships?Over the course of the years we've met a lot of different farmers and we grow everything that we can grow here in the Carolinas. We're talking greens and obviously tomatoes and melons and corn. We're working with our grain farmers who are growing wheat for us and grinding flour that we're actually getting into a hotel right now in Uptown Charlotte, which is really exciting. Cattle, pork, lamb. And really looking to create markets for our farming community in any way that we can. So right now, Michael Bowling, our general manager of CFT Market, which is the name of our distribution facility, he and his team are going all over the state and finding arms that we've never heard of and getting recommendations and compiling our list. A big part of what we're trying to put together is how we can take the burden on some things like transportation, because it's such a margin killer, and such a challenge for our farming communities. How do we get amazing produce from the east, you know, into Charlotte and the West, into Charlotte. So, we're working on getting a fleet of vehicles right now to do that. So, it's really just trying to find all of the barriers that our farming community faces, and then how do we create the infrastructure systems.
I want to end by asking sort of what are your hopes? Like what is the long game? Where do you see your work and the work of those who will follow you? Where does it lead?
Well, I think you have to be very naive to think this way. And sometimes, being naive isn't a bad thing because if you do too much research, then you think your way out of doing what you should be doing. So really, the long game is trying to change the entire industry. But it's so much more than that because our food and Ag is health. It IS our health industry, you know, and obviously it's our food industry. But it's also going to play a huge role in saving not our planet for the planet's sake but saving the planet for our sake. You know, it's just critical. So, I mean, really we're wanting to really follow in Netflix footsteps. Netflix came in and changed the entire entertainment industry relatively quickly. We're looking at automotive legacy manufacturers that weren't getting electric vehicles fast enough. So, Tesla came in and disrupted that. Now suddenly, everybody's moving in that direction. So really at our core, we want to take market share and drive our industry partners to focus more on this work. That is really the long game. For us, it's how do we build the foundation? I know I'm never really going to see it, but how do we build this foundation for the next generation of leadership to really get it going on what we've been able to build in this short time.
BioZack Wyatt is the President/CEO of Carolina Farm Trust. Zack grew up tending to a 300-acre dairy farm in northern Virginia. After graduating from Coastal Carolina University in 2003 with a degree in Business Administration, he worked in home mortgage lending and IT. Zack’s passion for bringing the community together over food, his understanding of the importance of equitable food access, and his drive to improve local food systems led him to develop Carolina Farm Trust in 2015.
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If people knew how much food they threw away each week, would they change their food-wasting ways? That's a question scientists explore in the 2023 State of Food Waste in America report. The research goal was to understand why and how households waste food, and what would motivate them to prevent food waste. In today's podcast, we'll talk with MITRE scientists Laura Leets and Grace Mika, members of a team who developed and launched the MITRE Food Waste Tracker app. This is a first of its kind app for households to log information about discarded food and learn ways to save money by reducing food waste. The Food Waste in America study team includes the Gallup Survey Company, researchers from the Ohio State University, the Harvard Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Interview Summary
Laura, let's begin with you. Can you give us a quick overview of why MITRE focused on measuring food waste at the household level and the behaviors?
Laura - In a general sense, Norbert, we know the United States waste 30 to 40% of our food, yet we do not know how much is wasted at the household level. We know that waste occurs along the entire farm to table supply chain, like approximately 15% with farms, 15% at manufacturing, about 20% at stores and restaurants and about 50% in the household. So, given that half the waste happens at the household level, it's important to measure it. If you can measure it, you can do something about it. Up to this point, people have not had an easy way to estimate their amount of food waste. So, to address this gap, not only did we develop a new way to measure household food waste and Grace will share more about that, but we also provided a baseline measurement of American household food waste.
I would like to really dig in a little bit more. How much food do American households waste, and do you have a sense of what kinds of foods people are wasting?
Laura - Let me start with the amount first. We found that the average American household wastes somewhere from 3 to 4.5 pounds per week. And there's two ways to measure household food waste. The first is you can focus on the edible or uneaten food. And with this measure, American households waste about on average three pounds per week. Second, you can add inedible food. So, that's your food scraps, your eggshells. And if you take edible plus inedible food together, then the American households wastes on average about 4.5 pounds per week. Let me give your listeners a couple analogies to understand that impact of that 3 to 4.5 pounds of household food waste. So, let's say we combine our own household food waste with everyone else's. The crop waste is large enough to cover the states of California and New York. From a personal perspective, imagine before every meal you scrape off 40% of the food on your plate. If you imagine that in each meal, you're going to start to understand that the current food waste is massive, and we're all contributing to it. So that's the measurement piece. I'm going to pass it over to Grace to discuss the types of food we're wasting.
Grace - Americans are wasting a wide variety of foods in their homes, but the number one wasted food type is your fresh produce. So, that would be your fruits and your vegetables.
I think this is really important to keep in mind, not only because, of course, fruits and vegetables are perishable, but when we think about healthy diets, many people in the nutrition space are encouraging fresh fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in general. Ao this is a really important finding, and I'm excited to know this. But it's also important for our listeners to think a little bit more about this. Grace, I would like to learn a little bit more from you. Can you tell us more about the MITRE Food Waste Tracker, the app itself?
Grace - I would be happy to. The MITRE Food Waste Tracker app is meant to be a tool for households who want to understand exactly what's going uneaten in their home. If you had asked me what exactly I ate yesterday and how much of that went into my trash can, I would have a really difficult time remembering an answer to that question. And that's for just yesterday, let alone multiple days or weeks ago. Not knowing what exactly goes uneaten would make it really challenging for me to cut back on that waste. So, to solve that problem, our team designed an app which allows for food waste to be logged in real-time. So, right as you're doing your meal prep or you're clearing off the dinner dishes or emptying your leftovers out from the fridge. And the app tracks details both about the food itself, like where you got that from and the food group that it belongs to, as well as where, why, and how the food was thrown away.And you can also track how much waste was produced, and we encourage you to use your hand as a guide to estimate the volume of that waste. So, your closed fist is about the size of a cup of food and your thumb about the size of a tablespoon. The more that you use the app to track, the more you will reveal patterns in the way that you waste. Maybe you find out that you're optimistically shopping for vegetables that your toddlers at home are just not interested in eating. Or maybe you're serving up heaping platefuls at dinner time, but then find that you're not hungry to finish that meal. So learning this will empower you to make small changes in the way that you shop for, prepare and store food to make sure that as little as possible is going to waste.
And if you're money-minded like many Americans are, you might be especially interested in an app feature which estimates the cost savings that you would experience if you cut back on your waste. So less food in the trash means more money in your wallet and the savings really add up. The average American family spends over $1,500 on wasted food each year. And tracking with the app is fast and simple. For each food that you dispose, you would simply click on the icons that best describe your waste. It would be really easy to get the whole family, even your your kids involved in tracking and thinking about the food that's going into the bin.
You've already touched on a few of these key findings about sort of the top foods that we end up wasting. Are there other findings that you would like to share with us?
Grace - So there are two behaviors that really stood out when it came to producing food waste. The first is simply being willing to eat your leftovers. Personally, I get really excited about leftover nights. It means I get a good home cooked meal with almost no prep work that evening. A lot of us are already doing this. About a third of Americans incorporate leftovers into new dishes and about half of us frequently eat leftovers just as a meal by themselves. Those leftovers add up. We found that households who consistently throw their leftovers away are wasting nearly four times as much as households that eat those up. We also found that households' understanding of and behavior around date labels plays a significant role in their levels of waste. A lot of us don't really understand how little date labels actually mean, and how little they're standardized. Not too long ago I was cooking with a friend, and we were making dinner together and he smelled a bag of shredded cheese and he said, "Oh, this smells kind of funky, but it's not past his date." And he added it into the dish. You should actually be doing the exact opposite of that. You should trust your senses over the date label when it seems that something is spoiling. There are some dates that are meant to be safety indications, but the majority are just a manufacturer's best guess of when food will pass its peak quality. And frequently, thrown away past date food that has no signs of spoilage so this leads to wasting over twice as much food. It can be easy to feel helpless when it comes to wasting food, but it's surprisingly simple to take control over your waste As we mentioned before, if you're curious about what sorts of behaviors are leading to waste in your own home, we have an app for that. So, our latest version of the app has new features to help you understand your waste and even get a sense of how much money you could be saving if you cut back on your waste in your home. I highly encourage you to check that out.
I’ve got to say I have done some work on date labels and have found this is an important area of consideration. But also, one where the modification of those date labels may actually help reduce food waste. I'm so happy to hear you talk about the sort of broader set of things that consumers can do to actually mitigate food waste in the household. You got into some of my own personal family issues around what do we do about leftovers, and I will not report this conversation to my family. So, thank you for that, Grace. Laura, I want to go back to you and ask about a big picture question. Why should our listeners reduce their household food waste?
Laura - Norbert, I believe I can make a compelling case for that. This is a rare opportunity when making a small change can have a large positive impact. Let me explain the amazing cascading ripple effect that happens when we reduce our household food waste. We had Grace reminding us with the app, and the first benefit is financial. An average American household can save at least $1,500 a year or $125 a month by reducing food waste. So just focus on that personal financial benefit, and then understand the resulting ripple effects. That first ripple effect is going to impact the ecology. Most of us don't realize significant resources go into producing food. The USDA reminds us that 50% of our land in America is used for food production and 80% of our water is used to produce that food. When we reduce our food waste, we're recognizing food as this precious resource, and we are supporting our food production industry. This is really important because America is one of the top food producers in the world.The next ripple effect impacts food security. Food security is part of national security. When you reduce your household food waste, you are also supporting national security. Next is a societal impact. Reducing food waste allows us to optimize our food and feed more people. And, finally, there is a significant environmental benefit. The number one substance going into our landfills is food waste. As it decomposes, it emits greenhouse gases that cause this pollution blanket to surround the planet. That pollution blanket traps heat and warms the planet. So, when we reduce our food waste, it's one of the top three activities we can do to reduce warming temperatures and extreme weather events. We all have the ability to combat climate change through our household food waste. These small changes in our food waste - they're going to result in positive financial, societal, and environmental benefits. It's such a powerful, impactful decision to reassess your food waste and think about ways you can reduce it.
Bios
Dr. Laura Leets is an accomplished researcher, teacher, and mentor. She brings 30 years of experience from academic and industry environments. She currently serves as an innovation lead and senior principal scientist at MITRE. In this leadership capacity, she works with researchers to identify, shape and conduct important, transformative, and impactful projects for government sponsors and the nation. She also serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture, and Technology Program and previously spent a decade as a Professor of Communication at Stanford University. She has been recognized with several top paper and teaching awards throughout her academic career.
Grace Mika, B.S., is a data scientist in MITRE’s Modeling & Analysis Innovation Center, where she has worked on projects for the Center of Disease Control, Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Benefits Association, and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisitions & Sustainment. She is passionate about visualizing data in a clear, accurate, and accessible way. Grace was instrumental in the design of a first-of-its-kind Food Waste Tracker App, which allows users to track waste as it occurs within their homes. Grace holds a B.S. in Applied Math and Psychology from the College of William & Mary and is currently working towards her Masters of Analytics at Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Dollar stores are the fastest growing food retailer in the United States, both by sheer number of stores and consumer food purchases. Just two corporations, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which also owns Family Dollar, operate more than 35,000 stores across the country. However, a growing body of research reveals that dollar stores offer limited healthy food options. Dollar stores shape the food environments of communities, especially in the South and Midwest regions and communities in rural areas with substantial shares of Black and Latin people and households with limited financial resources. What do we know about the impact dollar stores have on these communities and the overall wellbeing of community members? The Center for Science in the Public Interest conducted a national survey to understand how people perceive and actually use dollar stores. Today we will talk with lead author of this study, Senior Policy Scientist Sara John.
Interview Summary
My first question is what do we know about dollar stores and healthy food access?
There are more than 35,000-dollar stores across the country. So, to put that large number into context for people like me who have trouble processing them, that's more dollar stores than McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmarts combined. As you also mentioned, just two companies, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, control nearly all of them. Dollar stores really play a large role in food acquisitions for households. They can be especially important for households with limited incomes and those living in rural communities. These smaller store formats are much smaller than your typical grocery store or supermarket and tend to stock fewer fresh and healthy items. So, the body of evidence is still growing and we're still trying to figure out really how dollar stores interact with the food environment, whether or not they're driving out existing or potential new grocery stores or whether they're filling important food gaps in communities that otherwise lack food access.
I am really blown away by the number. I must admit I did not appreciate that they have 35,000 stores across the US. I know that there is a growing body of literature, as you suggested. One of our colleagues, Sean Cash at Tufts has been working in this space along with others in various disciplines have been thinking about the role of dollar stores. I'm interested to understand why CSPI conducted a national survey of those or perceptions, and what were some of the key findings?
As I mentioned, there's a lot of outstanding questions we still don't know. There have been more than 50 communities across the country that have already passed policies at the local level to ban or improve new dollar stores in their communities. But we don't understand community perceptions, usage and just I guess more plainly what people want from dollar stores. So, CSPI really wanted to take a stance to make policy, corporate, and research recommendations on this very quickly and growing retail format. But before doing so, we wanted to really make sure that we're centering our recommendations around what community members really want from dollar stores. We decided to conduct a national survey. We ended up having over 750 respondents from across the country of people with limited financial resources that lived near a dollar store. I have to say we were pretty surprised by our findings, especially given this popular sentiment that we have seen in the news media and with a lot of the local policy action. I would say that we found overall positive dollar store perceptions that people really are relying on dollar stores for food. But I would say just as many people want them to make healthy foods more available, affordable, and accessible.
Could you help me understand how did people find them beneficial? What were some of the things that you discovered, in terms of the benefits? But I'd like to also hear what were the points of contention? Where did they want some difference?
Community members had overall positive perceptions. I think there was about 82% of the survey respondents said that dollar stores helped their community rather than harmed it. And a lot of the key things that came up in the qualitative responses in our survey and the focus groups that we used to inform the survey was this overarching multifaceted concept of convenience. People said things like the store proximity, that they didn't have to walk a mile within the store itself to get to milk, and just an overall quick shopping trip. They also mentioned the affordability of products there. You know, not having to say no when shopping with their kids to something that's on the shelf. And then also a selection of specialty items - a lot of like different seasonal fare and things. Even using the phrase "thinking of the dollar stores as like going on a treasure hunt." You never quite know what's going to be there on the shelves. However, as you mentioned, there was also many deterrents listed for dollar stores as well. Things they could do better. So, low quality of products, the lack of predictable product availability, sometimes having bare shelves or not enough store supervision to be able to keep those shelves stocked. And also, the store appearance, both inside and out. Things like graffiti, trash, cluttered aisles. Those are all things that people that both shopped and did not shop at dollar stores noted in the survey. And all of this also kind of leads to another key theme that I mentioned at an overarching level, that people really wanted dollar stores to do more in terms of making healthy foods more accessible to them. So, 81% of our survey respondents thought dollar stores should stock more healthy items, and nearly as many thought they should do more to market and identify healthy options. We also included a list of more specific interventions of things that dollar stores could do to make healthy products more available, accessible, and affordable and one of the top responses was to provide SNAP fruit and vegetable discounts, kind of as one might see in like a Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program at dollar stores as well.
I'm really intrigued by something you all did in the survey. You looked at differences, particularly between SNAP participants and those who potentially are SNAP eligible, but non-participants. Are there any key findings you want to highlight about differences between those two groups?
Yes. Many respondents generally mentioned being able to stretch their budget at the dollar store and this included more SNAP participants purchasing more food with their SNAP benefits at dollar stores. So, this was across many healthy food categories. We also saw SNAP participants felt more strongly that dollar stores should be held more accountable for the health of their communities as well.
This is really fascinating. These findings are part of what leads you to some of the key policy recommendations. I'd be interested to understand a little bit more about what are the policies that you all thought should be considered or corporate response and even research action based on these findings.
I'll highlight just a few. You know the first one at the federal level is strengthening SNAP retailer stocking standards. So, the vast majority of dollar stores do participate in the SNAP program and currently SNAP authorized retailers are required to stock a small number of items. So, three varieties of items across four different categories. However, if the SNAP program did have stronger stocking standards that better aligned with nutrition promoting foods like in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, then all SNAP authorized retailers including dollar stores, would be required to stock more healthy items to participate in the program. Which is of course a huge benefit to the community. But also, a really important part of the business model of SNAP authorized retailers including dollar stores. At the local level, I already mentioned that more than 50 communities across the country have passed local policies, mostly to stop the spread of dollar stores such as through dollar store density ordinances. These look like saying a new dollar store can't locate within, let's say an existing mile, of a current dollar store. However, these policies are really only getting at new dollar stores and don't really do anything to address the existing 35,000. We also see an opportunity to strengthen and improve upon these existing policies and address what we found in the survey that community members want by requiring dollar stores to stock healthier food, make it more available, such as through healthy stocking standards or healthy food overlays in the local zoning code or even exempting dollar stores from these dispersal limits if they do stock a specific variety or number of healthy staple foods. At the corporate level, we're hopeful that this survey and its results make the business case to dollar stores for stocking healthier foods, making them more widely available. We've seen already actually both Dollar General and Dollar Tree moving in this direction. Dollar General, especially. I think about 16% of their current stores now do offer fresh produce. So, they're building out their supply chain, their distribution centers, and I would say retrofitting and redesigning stores to be able to make more fresh and healthy foods available. But we think they can do more, and especially do more in terms of prioritizing fresh food expansion in areas with lower incomes and limited food access. Many of these dollar store models started by locating in rural areas. We think if they could really leverage their ubiquity and where they're currently located to spread healthy food access to those communities especially, it could make a really big difference. We also have seen dollar stores in recent years put out public environmental social governance or ESG priorities. We think that these should be expanded and really prioritize healthy food access and nutrition goals. And one more thing I'll say around corporate recommendations is the expansion of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children or WIC authorization of dollar stores. Currently, based on our scan of the current list of WIC authorized retailers, there are no corporate dollar stores that are currently WIC authorized. By participating in WIC, and by adhering to those much more rigorous healthy stocking standards, it could do a lot to make a variety of healthy product, fresh produce, whole grains, dairy, baby food, formula more accessible to moms and kids.
I have to ask this question as a researcher, what are some important questions that the survey really prompted you to think more about or would like to have others come in and support research in this area?
There are so many. As I mentioned, the evidence in this space is really nascent, but is growing. So, one thing I would highlight is that we really are proud of this survey and its national scope. However, the survey doesn't reflect all communities and their desires and wishes. And so we hope that this survey could be used as a model and could be replicated in local communities to inform local policy and corporate intervention. We also think there's a lot to still do to better understand the current dollar store food environment. There have been some studies that have been done at small scale in some states and localities, but we think that current instruments could be better adapted and specifically tailored to the dollar store environment to better understand them and their variation across the country. Especially as we start to see this shift in corporate practices. There is a lot of, again, variation in terms of different dollar stores and what they're offering. We also really hope that we could see dollar store corporations, and maybe this is overly ambitious, but to collaborate with researchers to better understand what corporations already know, to better lift up what challenges are associated with increasing the stock and availability of healthier foods. We know that cost space and supply chain complexities, this is not an easy solution, and so how can researchers work together with corporate dollar stores to figure this out. Also, we'd be really interested in piloting healthy food marketing interventions, thinking about how this shift in healthy product placement, price and promotion might be impacting customer purchases, customer food consumption, and ultimately health.
Wow, this is a great set of ways for a variety of researchers to come in. It sounds like not only could academics do some of this work, but it sounds like there may even be space for citizen scientists to come in and look at what's going on in the food environments where they are to help inform that conversation. I think this is really fascinating. What's next for CSPI's work on dollar stores.
CSPI really hopes to be able to support efforts to advance the recommendations we've made in this report. At least one I'll highlight that we've already started to work on, is we just launched a corporate campaign; Don't Discount Families, Dollar General. Really pressuring Dollar General to improve healthy food access at their stores through these WIC expansion efforts that I referenced earlier. So, making sure that dollar stores expand their healthy food offerings by adhering to those more rigorous WIC stocking standard requirements. Making those foods both available and more accessible to moms and kids participating in WIC. You know, that includes fresh, frozen, canned produce, whole grains, dairy, healthy pantry staples, baby food and formula, but also in doing so makes healthy foods more available for any customer that walks through a WIC authorized Dollar store. I would mention that in ways that you can get involved, please feel free to reach out to me if you're doing aligned work in this space. We also have a petition that consumers can sign onto, and we already have generated over 7,000 emails to Dollar General and that number is still ticking, so please join our coordinated advocacy efforts and we also working on a sign-on letter in terms of coalition building to get organizations and researchers who are supporting healthy food access through dollar stores. So, I encourage everyone to check out our resources and again, please be in contact if you have any questions.
BioSara John is a Senior Policy Scientist at the Center for Science in Public Interest and leads the organization’s federal policy and private sector efforts to create a healthier, more equitable food retail environment. Prior to joining CSPI, Sara served as the Evaluation Director for SNAP incentive programs across New England and worked at the Partnership for a Healthier America. She has a PhD in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts Friedman School, an MS in Education from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in Biology and BA in Public Policy from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of food products in the U.S.? As Auburn University historian, Xaq Frohlich, reveals in his new book, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age," these seemingly innocuous strips of information reveal the high stakes politics that can help determine what we eat and why. In today's podcast, Frohlich will explore popular ideas about food, diet, and responsibility for health that have influenced what goes on the Nutrition Facts panel and who gets to decide that.
Interview Summary
I'm really happy to have you on today's podcast. So, why don't we just jump right in. What would you say are the key historical moves in the food policy arena with respect to labeling?
One of the things I talk about in this book is an informational turn in food politics. And what I'm specifically referring to there is a shift since the 1970s from an older way that the Food and Drug Administration approached regulating the market to its current focus on informative labeling. So, at the beginning of my book and at the beginning of the story, in the 1930s, 1940s, the FDA was trying to handle this big market full of lots of different products, especially packaged and processed foods. And under the legislation in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, authorized food standards. And the idea was that for any mass-produced food, they would hold hearings. People would say, "This is what we think the food should look like." They would then publish the standards, which would look kind of like a list of ingredients and ranges of the ingredients they could use, and then say, "Okay, all foods have to be the standard form of food. If not, we will either remove them from the market or call them imitation." And this was a system they used for decades, and it created a lot of problems. Then, late 1960s people started to get unhappy about this. There was this big turning point connected to the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health where Nixon administration brought together lots of nutrition scientists. And one of the conclusions that came out of that is we need to change the FDA's system. And so, in the early 70s, the Food and Drug Administration says, "We're going to pivot away from these food standards and start focusing on informative labels." This is when you get the requirement of ingredient labeling on all foods, including standard foods, and you also get the first voluntary nutrition information label. My book looks at this change in strategies away from standardizing foods towards standardizing information about foods and creating these kinds of consumer-oriented information labels.
I love the fact that you helped us understand this idea of the information age, because once you read that and think, "Oh, well you're talking about something about the internet," but it's even more foundational about how we communicate what is a product. I found it really fascinating to read in your book where you talked about what I perceive to be really laborious conversations around what exactly is peanut butter or some other product. I mean, it seems like that took up a lot of space. Do you think that was ultimately productive? Is that the reason why we see this information change? Or was there something important about that effort on its own?
So, there were advantages and disadvantages of the old food standards approach. One of the advantages is that everybody who wanted to raise an issue was invited to attend those hearings. This meant that you could have really colorful exchanges. There is one woman who ran a homemaker's association who would show up and she would get a lot of attention because she was very colorful in her criticisms of proposed standards. It could be a very democratic space in that sense. On the other hand, they could run on for years. And there were contentious hearings where you would have dozens of lawyers from different food companies. It was held like a kind of legal court proceedings, and there would be objections, and counterevidence, and counter-witnesses. One of the complaints in the 1970s is that this was another example of an overly burdensome centralized government agency and process that was expensive. And the switch towards using informative labels and moving away from food standards was seen to be a kind of lighter touch form of governance. The disadvantage is that now you have an even more backstage discussion about what goes on this label, and it means that consumers have even less access to who's making those decisions for them.
Can you talk a little bit more about that? What's in the backstage that we're not privy to?
I think one of the misconceptions about the food label is that it is this window into the food, right? Especially something like nutrition and ingredients. You look at packaged food and you don't know what you're seeing, and therefore if they require the company to print the ingredients and nutrition, then you can look at that and now you have the kind of answer. In practice, it's more complicated deciding what kind of information appears there, which nutrients do you want to do, how do you calibrate those in terms of the daily diet? Or how do you name the ingredients? Do you use the scientific name? Do you use the common name? Those questions are decided by people backstage. This could be FDA regulators. They could allow companies to make those decisions. And so, the label is actually a translation of those kinds of decisions. One of the arguments in my book is that you can't get away from the values of these expert communities in deciding what goes on that label.
Yes, and thank you for that. I am really intrigued by how you are talking about the role of FDA, and I want to come back to that in a moment, this sort of panel of experts, and something that we think is so foundational, foods that we eat. We should know what they are. We believe we know what they are. They're part of our larger history. But what I'm also hearing is actually government organizations mediate what we understand food is. I'm intrigued to learn some more. Given what you've learned about the history of food labeling, what do labels offer as a policy tool?
Often the way people see food labels is that is a kind of knowledge fix, especially with packaged foods. Because you don't know what's in them, there is this sense that there's a kind of uneven playing ground between the producer and the consumer, right? The producer knows how it was produced. They know what's in the food. They're selling this to consumers and there's concern that they might mislead the consumer. And so, this idea is that the label is a kind of technical solution to that market problem. And in many ways, it can work this way, but there's actually a kind of translation work involved in there. It's a more complicated story than just a knowledge fix. And in fact, a lot of studies that look at how people read ingredient labels, and especially nutrition labels, will talk about how they fail to understand this or that aspect of the nutrition label. Because consumers are dealing with decision fatigue, they're in this, what people call the attention economy, where they don't have a lot of time to look at labels. So often, reading the label is the least important part of food labels for policy. In fact, over and over again, in this history, I discovered that when the FDA was introducing changes to the food label, regulators and others would comment on how actually the biggest impact is that it would lead to companies changing the foods before. So, even if consumers aren't reading the label, they're affected by those changes because companies are reformulating the foods.
I'm really interested in that. I know that there is a body of literature that talks about this idea that by having to put the information out in the public, what you're saying is companies reformulate because they want their products to look better, or maybe they actually are making the products better. Is that a fair assessment?
I think this is where you get into the tricky aspect of what we mean by better. So, taking the example of the nutrition label, one of the problems that you get with the beginning of nutrition labeling in the 1970s is it really favors a particular idea of what is better. So, if better means more of certain nutrients like protein or vitamins, and less of other nutrients like fats, or certain bad fats and sugars, then companies might reprocess a food, right? They'll take out sugar. They'll take out fat in it. And maybe they'll add in other ingredients to make it taste good anyway. And they'll kind of game that profile. And for people who are concerned about nutritional health in this sort of sense of nutrition, this might be great. But if your idea of good for you is less processed, you know this older idea of wholesome, you have this idea that the food was made in a kind of traditional sense, now you have a less good food. One of the problems that nutrition labeling raises is that it's not that it's misleading consumers, but it's getting them to focus on certain attributes of the food and not thinking about other things that may be important for health.
That's really helpful. I'm doing some work on date labels, and I've been thinking about this idea of how far can these labels go, and helping people make the best choices possible, however we define best. And that these labels are, as you said, the beginning. They're definitely not the end of that decision or that process. So, this is a really a rich conversation. I want to ask you about misconceptions. What would you say is the biggest misconception about food labels from the point of view of consumers? You gave us a little bit of an idea about that, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
One of the misconceptions about the food label is that it is this window into the food, right, especially something like nutrition and ingredients. When consumers receive this information label, they often take it at face value as sort of, "I now have this information about the food." And therefore, if they require the company to print the ingredients and nutrition, then you can look at that and now you have the kind of answer. In practice, it's more complicated. Deciding what kind of information appears there, which nutrients do you want to do, how do you calibrate those in terms of the daily diet? Or how do you name the ingredients? Do you use the scientific name? Do you use the common name? Those questions are getting decided by people backstage. This could be FDA regulators. They could allow companies to make those decisions. And so the label is actually a translation of those kinds of decisions.
One of my arguments is that you can't get away from the values of these expert communities in deciding what goes on that label for the informative label. And in my book, I really try to argue that it's not just a kind of conduit into the product. It's not like suddenly you have the information. Instead, you need to read these labels as kind of value and political discussions among people who often have to make compromises. My favorite example of this with the nutrition facts panel was a decision to use the 2,000-calorie amount for daily values for the average American consumer. I remember interviewing a guy at the FDA, and I asked him about that, and he said, "Well, actually that's not accurate." It's not like if you averaged out everyone's caloric needs. Even in the 1990s, based on what they knew then, it would've been 2,000. For men, it was much higher. It was like 2,350. For women, it was lower. But they settled on 2,000 as a kind of pragmatic decision for multiple reasons. One, they hoped that if it was rounded, consumers wouldn't think of it as like a precise tool and it would be easier to do math with. And also it was on the low end of what you should get. So, the idea was that this would discourage people from eating too much. So, they made all these kinds of compromises in it. But if consumers see this and they see it as a kind of science, then they tend to think it's more rational than it really is.
And that's the kind of thing I was most surprised about from doing this history was discovering that actually consumers aren't reading these labels as rational calculators. They're reading them emotionally. And the best example of this I got was interviewing Burkey Belser, who recently passed, and he was the head of the design firm that designed the nutrition box label. And he described it as a government brand. And he said, you know, "Seeing this thing everywhere, it's not just about how people read it. It's there in the background, kind of like brands and logos." And it's that emotional relationship to the information that I think policymakers really need to think about with labels, not just seeing them as a kind of rational decision-making device, but as something that is shaping consumers' emotional decisions about the food they eat.
You've raised an important point for me, because I was going to ask, what do you think policy makers may be misunderstanding about these labels? I'm wondering, do policy makers understand these labels as a brand, a government brand? Are they capturing or dealing with the things that you're just talking about, the emotional connection that consumers have with these products or these labels?
I think that one of the advantages of labeling, and I think this is why the FDA started looking at it more as an important tool in the 1970s, is that it's a lot easier to focus on the package as a kind of site where you can police market behavior. So, it's much easier to do that than to go into manufacturer's factories to kind of say, "This is good, that is bad." You can use it as a kind of accountability device. I think from the point of view of regulation in a big national and increasingly international market, that's one of its advantages. The limitations of this for reforming food systems in my opinion, is it also ends up being a kind of outsourcing of work onto consumers, right? Instead of saying, "We want to make sure foods are safe and nutritious. We want to avoid certain kinds of ingredients or discourage certain kinds of unhealthy foods." Governments are basically saying, "All right, we're going to put it on the label and let the consumer do that work." And I think that is one limitation of them. The other thing that I also think happens is it's not just outsourcing to the consumers, but it's also putting that in the market and using the market to solve those kinds of problems. And for mandatory labels, like the nutrition facts panel, this means that consumers who have the time and resources might end up adopting a healthier diet because of it. But many consumers who don't have those kinds of choices aren't going to be helped by this informative fix. For voluntary labels, and this is something I talk about at the end of the book. I call them lifestyle labels or risk labels, depending on what you're talking about. So organic, carbon footprint labels, concerned about the environment, these kinds of third-party certificate labels, it becomes this kind of opt out. Instead of reforming the political system, you're providing this kind of market upsell option for consumers to have those resources.
I'm intrigued to think about the FDA in its historical place. Your book provides a history of past FDA activities on food labeling, and you talked wonderfully about those already. How does it speak to current policy concerns at the FDA? And you were giving a little bit of an indicator of that with the front-of-pack labeling. I'm wondering are there other spaces about FDA concerns today?
I think if you're really committed to reforming the food system, then food labels are only ever just the start to that reform work. They can't be treated as the solution. And I think in the past you have had a lot of cases, particularly with public government, where the label is put forward as the kind of answer to a political problem. And then they don't think about the need for staff to keep the education up about the label or enforcement. And so, they don't treat it like the beginning of that reform work.
One of the things I find really exciting about what your book is doing, that you're a historian and you're talking about the development of this policy and it has important implications. What do you think history offers us in the current policy discourse? What do you bring to the table that we miss out by not talking with historians?
So, when I was doing this research, this event that I didn't know happened that turned out to be really important in this story was this White House conference in 1969. At the time, the impetus for this conference was the sort of sudden public awareness of ongoing hunger in America. In the 1960s, people who were involved in civil rights realized that if they could focus on the issue of hunger, they could get a broader attention to problems of poverty and disparity in America. In 1968, this became a big public issue because of widely watched TV documentary. Everyone was talking about hunger and its connection to poverty and inequalities in America. And when the Nixon administration created the White House conference, the language of poverty and the concern of poverty was central. Then, there was a kind of shift over the course of the conference. Initially it's talking about hunger and how that's a malnutrition issue related to poverty. But by the end of the conference, they're starting to focus on consumer education, better labels, better information. And in some sense, we haven't got away from that framing shift. I really saw this recently with the Biden administration. It held its own White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in 2022, and nowhere in its report was there a mention or discussion of poverty. They were really focused on foods as a vehicle for health, improving labels instead of talking about poverty as the kind of root concerns. Again, the kind of overall framing is if we engineer better foods in this nutritional sense, or we give you better information labels, then we'll solve the health problems America's facing. I think that that policy focus is ignoring the broader context of how Americans eat and how they're making their decisions. So, I see my book as kind of providing a broader lens to think of the issues, not just historically, but also looking beyond sort of the field of nutrition or considerations of government, but looking at how these different institutions are all interacting with each other to shape policy. I think the two important things here are about what history can offer in present policy. One is that I actually think a lot of people working on these issues today have no idea where they came from. I've experienced this as I've given talks. I've had people in industry, or people who work on policies sort of say, "I didn't realize that that was where the standard for milk came from," when they were talking about recent changes in terms of the nomenclature for milk. Or "I didn't understand that," you know, "healthy, as it was defined in the 1990s, was in the context of one kind of health war, but today there's a kind of new public health concern about other types of foods." So, part of it is that I think that policymakers will really appreciate getting that older context. I often call it institutional memory because you lose that institutional memory. The other thing that's really striking is, at the beginning of my story in the 1930s and 1940s, nobody was using words like saturated fats or carbohydrates. It was a different era and people were really talking about food differently. So, it's useful. I think of it as like study abroad. You know, you go to this place, you see that people are talking very differently, and then you come back to your home country, you know, or the president, and you realize, "Oh," you know, "there's this aspect of food that I was taking for granted that has really changed in the last," you know, "five, six decades."
Bio
Xaq Frohlich is Associate Professor of History of Technology at Auburn University. He works on issues relating to food and risk at the intersections of science, law, and markets. His research focuses on the historical intersections of science, law, and markets, and how the three have shaped our modern, everyday understanding of food, risk, and responsibility. His work explores questions relating to consumerism and the changing relationships between the state, experts, and the public in the production of everyday knowledge: how do we “know” what we know about food and its relation to health? In what ways has our informational environment for food changed with the industrialization of food production and retailing? Frohlich earned his PhD in history, anthropology, and STS at MIT. He teaches courses on food and power, the intersections of science, technology and the law, and the history of business and capitalism.
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In 2022, Congress established Summer EBT, the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. The authorization of Summer EBT represents a historic investment in the nutrition and wellbeing of almost 30 million children who will qualify for the program. But states that piloted Summer EBT, or operated Pandemic EBT programs in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic know that getting these benefits into the hands of families will involve overcoming complex challenges related to data and technology. That's why Code for America and No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength joined forces to create the Summer EBT Playbook, a comprehensive free resource designed to help state agencies plan for and implement a human-centered Summer EBT program. Today we will talk with Eleanor Davis, director of Government Innovation on the Safety Net team at Code for America. In her role, she helps government agencies adopt best practices for human-centered digital benefit delivery.
Interview Summary
Why is Summer EBT significant?
Well, I think you gave us a good intro. Summer EBT is a brand-new benefit program and it's designed to reduce childhood hunger during the summer months by providing families with a monthly grocery benefit to feed their kids when they're not receiving meals at school. So, almost 30 million kids in the US receive free or reduced-price meals at school, but during the summer many of them struggle to access nutritious food because they're not receiving those meals at school. School is out of session. Summer EBT is designed to give families $120 per child in the summer to help them buy groceries and it really has the potential to dramatically reduce childhood hunger. It's a tremendous moment because Summer EBT is the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. For those of us in government or in the food access space, this is really I would say, a once in a generation opportunity to shape the implementation of the program to make sure it really meets the needs of families and children.
So, why did Code for America and Share Our Strength develop the Summer EBT Playbook? What was the challenge?
Code for America is a 501 C3 nonprofit organization. We partner with government at all levels to make the delivery of public services more equitable, more effective, and more accessible using technology and data. And we've spent the last decade helping states deliver safety net benefit programs in more human-centered ways. The Summer EBT program, as we mentioned, has immense potential, but we also know that states are going to encounter many challenges in implementing this program in 2024 and beyond. I think standing up a brand-new benefits program is a huge undertaking generally, but Summer EBT will present some really specific challenges to states and we learned a lot about this back in 2020. So, at the start of the pandemic, Congress authorized an emergency response program called Pandemic EBT, that was very similar to Summer EBT in many ways. It was the same idea, really sort of providing families with a grocery benefit while schools are closed because of COVID-19. And so, in 2020 and 2021, Code for America worked directly with about a dozen states to help them deliver Pandemic EBT benefits. And through that process we saw very up close what made that program so hard to implement. Delivery of the program really relies on effective data and technology systems. So, really being able to find the right data in state systems and use that data to deliver benefits. And a lot of these challenges will also be true for Summer EBT, right? It's a very similar delivery process. So, states really needed help planning for Summer EBT and really designing systems and processes that will help them operationalize this brand-new program so that it can really live up to the promise spelled out in the policy. So, that's why we partnered with the No Kid Hungry Campaign. We really wanted to develop a resource that would help states design effective and human centered Summer EBT programs. And our goal was really just to sort of help as many states as possible implement this program.
This is really interesting, and I would like to understand a little bit more. What challenges did states face in implementing the pandemic EBT and how do you see that showing up in the Summer EBT? I mean is it just getting the right software or is it something else?
There are so many really, it's less about the software and more about the data. So fundamentally, I think some of the biggest challenges that we walk through in the playbook certainly, but that we know states are going to struggle with is really around using data to determine who is eligible for Summer EBT. So maybe just taking a step back, there are sort of two pathways for confirming who's eligible for Summer EBT. The first is called streamline certification. Basically, this means that the state uses the data that it already must determine if a family is eligible for Summer EBT and then issues those benefits automatically. So, for example, if a child is already participating in a program that should make them eligible like SNAP or in some states Medicaid, they should automatically receive Summer EBT. And similarly, if a child is in the foster system or is in a Head Start program or if a child has applied for and is therefore receiving already free and reduced-price meals at school, those children should receive Summer EBT automatically. But children who can't be certified as eligible through any of those pathways will have to apply for the Summer EBT benefits. So that's sort of the other eligibility route. States must provide a way for families to directly apply if they can't certify them through streamline certification. So, the idea is that the majority of children who are eligible for the program should actually get benefits automatically through streamline certification. And that's really fantastic, right? We should always be looking for ways to reduce the administrative burden that low-income families face when they aim to gain access to programs they're entitled to. So theoretically, if a state already has enough information to say this family is eligible for Summer EBT, they should just send that money out automatically and without the family having to do anything. That's sort of the best-case scenario. On the state side though, this is actually really complicated to do. The data that states need to use to determine that eligibility is all over the place, right? It's in Head Start programs, it's in the foster care system, it's in a state's SNAP or Medicaid eligibility system and it's in the schools, and school data presents really specific challenges for states to be able to use. So, states therefore have to identify where is all this data? What systems is it in? What agencies have this data? They then must aggregate all that data in one place that's central and usable. They have to clean and de-duplicate and match all that data across those different data sources. And then of course they have to deal with any inaccuracies or gaps in the data. So, data collection, data aggregation, data management, these are really sort of the core challenges of implementing this program. How do you collect all of this information into one place and use it to deliver benefits to families? This is really one of the core challenges that we focus on in the playbook.
It's really helpful to hear how you all are helping states think through this. And I would imagine that there are some differences across states. How in the playbook have you been able to best manage the uniqueness of these different states?
It's really tricky. I think we always say if you've seen one state system, you've seen one state system, no two states really look the same. And I'm using state really as a shorthand, tribal nations can implement this program, territories, US territories can also implement this program. So, there really is no one standard way that states backend infrastructure looks. And even when it comes to implementing this program, Summer EBT, different state agencies are sort of taking the lead in different states on administering this program. So, I think we're doing our best to help understand what unique challenges states are facing while also recognizing that the sort of themes, the main things, the primary challenges are going to remain the same basically across a lot of states. And so, we are really sort of in the playbook offering best practices, recommendations that we know will be universally helpful no matter really what a backend state system looks like.
Can you give us a little bit of the flavor of those best practices?
Absolutely. So, I want to talk about a couple here because this program gets really weedy really fast. I think the first one that we really talk about is client support. As we've been discussing, this is a really complicated program to administer. It's also brand new, right? So, families are going to need support navigating this program. They're going to have questions; they're going to be confused. Even after multiple years of Pandemic EBT, many families were still confused about why they did or did not end up receiving benefits. So, who is eligible? Can I expect these benefits? How do I get them? These are all questions that families are going to have. So, states need to be prepared to provide really consistent and clear communication to families. And they also need to have really easily accessible pathways for families to reach out and ask questions when they have them. And we can already really anticipate what a lot of those questions are going to be. One of the biggest points of confusion for families is going to be, "Do I need to apply or not?" Right? We talked earlier about the two different pathways streamline certification or filling out an application. From the state perspective it's pretty clear, but as a family, how do I know if I can expect to receive these benefits automatically or if I need to apply? And the complicated policy language here, of course you know about streamline certification, families don't understand that, right? We have to sort of really communicate clearly with families. I think one example of this is families whose children attend community eligibility provision schools or CEP schools; these are schools that serve free meals to all of their students. They're usually schools that are in low-income areas and because a certain percentage of their students are categorically eligible for free meals because they participate in other programs like SNAP or TANF, they're able to just give free meals to all of their students. So, families at CEP schools have never had to apply for school meals, their kids just get them. But because these families haven't applied for free or reduced-price meals, they're actually going to have to apply for Summer EBT. You can see how from a family perspective, this starts to get really confusing from a messaging standpoint, right? We're telling families if your income was below this level, at any point in the previous school year, you're going to be eligible for Summer EBT. But if you haven't applied to free or reduced-price meals this year, you have to apply unless you already received SNAP or TANF, in which case don't apply, you'll get benefits automatically. So, the messaging starts to get really confusing. How states communicate with families about this program and how to access it really matters. So, in the playbook we have a lot of resources on best practices for community outreach, how to talk about this program, how to leverage many methods of communication, right? Like email, text, phone calls, to really let families know about this program and give them the information they need to navigate it.
Wow, that's great. And it's interesting to hear you talk about this because early on I had the impression you were really worried about the data, but you're also really concerned about how people function in the system. So, I've heard you mention this idea of human-centered design and human-centered digital benefit delivery. Can you explain a little bit more about what that really means and why it's important?
Human-centered design really just means creating things that really meet people's needs and that are really easy for people to use and access. And that's really important, right? Just like the example I was just sharing with this program. It's a complicated program and if the systems aren't designed in a way that makes it easy for families to access, easy for families to interact with, they're not going to see the benefit of the program ultimately, and the program isn't going to meet its goals, which is reducing childhood hunger. So, the principles of human-centered design are really about thinking through what do families need when it comes to interacting with this program and how do we design the program in such a way that gives them those things? I think a great example of this is the application, right? We have a lot of best practices in the playbook related to the application component of the program. I mentioned that while many families will receive benefits automatically, the regulations for Summer EBT do require that many families will have to apply. So, states have to design applications and there are a lot of considerations that need to go into creating an application in a human-centered way, right? It needs to be accessible, which means it needs to be available in a lot of different languages, which can be really tough. California has 19 threshold languages that people speak. So, we need to translate this into the languages that people speak. The questions need to be written in what we call plain language, which is just conversational, the way that people actually talk so that they're really easy to understand and they need to flow in a way that makes sense to someone filling out the application. And this really matters because if the questions are hard to understand or hard to answer, it's likely that more people will answer incorrectly or submit the wrong answer. Meaning that they might not get the benefit even if they are in fact eligible. And then we also talked a lot about the importance of mobile accessibility. And this is really critical because more and more low-income families are what's called smartphone dependent, which means they don't have internet in their homes, but they do have a smartphone. So, they rely on that smartphone to do things online like fill out applications. But a lot of government websites are not built to fit the smaller screen on a mobile phone. And that makes it really hard for people to do things like fill out online applications for benefit programs. So, it's really important to make sure that the online application is designed to work on a mobile phone because that's how we know most families will be accessing it. I think the application component demonstrates a lot of the sort of thoughtful design work that's going to be required to create a program that's truly accessible for the people that need it.
I'm really appreciative of this. And as I heard you talk about this, especially with mobile devices and I was thinking about younger folks, but I also know that there are grandparents or older adults who will care for young children who may be eligible. What considerations do you make for older adults or people with disabilities that may make using certain devices difficult?
That's a great question. We have done a fair amount of research on this and what we found is that the sort of principles of human-centered design we really need to design for everyone. And that means designing for accessibility or ability, right? Designing for multiple languages, designing for whatever device people have access to, designing for different levels of comfort with technology. I think we really believe in the sort of principle that if you design it for the person that's going to have the most trouble accessing the program, you make it easier for everybody, right? So, we really think about the highest need population and design for that population and then really believe that we sort of make it more accessible for all populations that need to access the program.
This has been really helpful for me to consider how government can work for people by using human-centered design to really move the process of applying and attaining these assets or these benefits, easier for folks. And I'm really grateful to hear the work that you all are doing with Share Our Strength. I got to ask this last question. What are your hopes for Summer EBT in 2024 and even beyond?
I love this question. I have so many, I spent a lot of time so far talking about how hard this program is going to be for states to implement and it will be, I don't want to downplay the significant effort that it's going to take for states to stand up this program and deliver benefits, especially in this first year. That said, in my experience, people who work in government are incredibly resilient and resourceful and they are incredibly creative problem solvers. Pandemic EBT was really hard to implement, and states were trying to figure out how to deliver that program in the first few months of a global pandemic where everything was shut down and there was sort of historic need for benefit programs. But by the time that program ended, every single state had delivered Pandemic EBT benefits to families. So Summer EBT, especially in these first few years of its implementation, will be challenging certainly, but it won't be impossible. States have really proved that they can do this, right? States are good at this. So, I guess my greatest hope is that states are able to address many of the challenges of implementation this year in order to put benefits in the hands of families and that more states opt in, in future years, right? So that eventually all families get to benefit from this program. Ultimately a policy is only as good as its implementation, right? We have to help states design programs that are effective for them to implement, but also that work for the families that they're serving so that the Summer EBT program can live up to the promise outlined in the policy.
Bio
Eleanor Davis is the Program Director for Government Innovation at Code for America. In her role, she enables government agencies to adopt best practices for human-centered digital benefit delivery. She joined Code for America from Futures Without Violence, a national public health and social justice nonprofit dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence. There she worked for 6 years on the Public Education Campaigns & Programs team, developing public-facing initiatives that support the ability of frontline providers and advocates to more effectively respond to and prevent violence and trauma. Eleanor is a graduate of the University of Chicago where she studied Sociology and Performance Studies, and received a Masters in Public Health from UC Berkeley. Outside of work you can often find her gardening in her backyard or singing in her family band.
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In 2022, more than 6 million people visited farmers markets across North Carolina. Today, we're talking with a team of people who are the driving force behind the North Carolina Farmers Market Network: Maggie Funkhouser, Catherine Elkins, and Nora Rodli. The goal of the North Carolina Farmers Market is to create and support a thriving network of marketplaces for the state's local food and farm products. The nonprofit network, which was recently awarded a USDA Farmers Market Promotion Capacity-building grant, will provide education, programming, and partnership development assistance to farmers market managers, including resources to support historically underserved populations.
Interview Summary
I would like to take a moment to actually get to know you all a little bit better. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in farmers markets. Catherine, let's start with you.
Catherine - Sure. I've been doing this for the longest, I suppose. I went with my mom many times to Amish markets in Pennsylvania where I grew up. She was not a very good gardener. But we could buy everything that she liked at the market. I also worked a bit at the Carrboro Farmers Market, and I then got an opportunity to work with the Morehead City Saturday Market, a one-year lifespan. And the Old Beaufort Farmers Market we started up the next year, that's now in its 10th year. That makes me proud. I liked that market a lot. Managed it for two years, and I'm still one of those devotees that go on vacation and have to look up the closest farmers market just to check out new stuff.
Maggie - Like most managers, I did not go to school to be a farmers market manager. It kind of found me, I guess you could say. I went to graduate school directly after undergrad for classical languages. Then when I moved back to the Triangle, I just sort of started getting involved more and more with local food. I worked in restaurants, I worked in coffee shops, and one time I worked in an artisan bakery; I managed a culinary garden, and I just kind of kept getting drawn into different parts of the community in our local food system in the Triangle. In 2019, I applied for and was offered a job at the Carrboro Farmers Market as the assistant manager. I worked there for about a year. Then in 2020, I took over as the manager, and I've been here ever since.
Nora - So, I actually come to farmers markets as a farmer. For the past 25 years, I've farmed in various places around the country, mostly New Mexico and Hawaii and now North Carolina. That has given me the ability to see and experience farmers markets in a lot of different manners, whether it be a small market or a large market, and urban versus rural settings. I feel like I am uniquely on board as a cheering squad for farmers markets.
Thank you. We all need a cheerleader on our side, so it's good to hear that. I really would love to ask each of you more questions about your past because there are some interesting connections that I hear. Catherine, the Marine Lab is in Beaufort, and I'm intrigued to know more about how those relationships develop. Maggie, I would love to talk more about your training as someone in the classics has influenced the way you think about this. I mean, this idea of food and agriculture is deeply within that literature, and so that's really fascinating. And, Nora, I just can't wait to learn more about Hawaii. But I can't do that right now. We have other things to focus on. However, if those answers come up in your other responses, please feel free. I'm intrigued to talk to you all a little bit more about the North Carolina Farmers Market Network. What is it and who does it serve?
Maggie - I'll kind of kick us off talking about the network a little bit, and maybe my colleagues can chime in. So, we incorporated this year as a 501 nonprofit under the name North Carolina Farmers Market Network. NCFMN, for short. That's our kind of alphabet-soup title that I might say really, really fast. But there had kind of been plans and thoughts to form a statewide network in North Carolina for a long time. We gained a lot of momentum in 2020 because in 2020 we started, with the help of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, the State Extension and RAFI, when the pandemic hit, we started having these weekly Zoom calls that were specifically for farmers market managers. The reason we started them in March 2020 was because we were all really, really unsure about what was happening and what was going to happen to the farmers market spaces. Many of our markets across the state were shut down. Many of them had a lot of additional regulations and policies and emergency protocols that were really hard to implement, especially if there were no permanent staff or volunteer staff or part-time staff. In my position, I'm lucky enough to be full-time, but many market managers are not. So, we started out as a rag-tag group of market managers that were just trying to stay open and operating in a really difficult time. We had weekly calls, and we went over different policies we had, different marketing techniques we were using to communicate to the public about our pandemic response. I really clung to it as a source of support during that time. Then over the next couple of years, we started meeting biweekly, then we started meeting monthly. We kind of realized that we had a lot to talk about and a lot to share. Our Zoom name was COVID-19 Calls for Farmers Markets. But what started out as COVID-19 Calls for Farmers Markets turned into resource sharing, professional development, learning things like grant writing, bookkeeping, managing conflicts. And last year we decided to make it official. So, we applied for our FMPP grant, our Farmers Market Promotion Program grant, through the USDA, and we were awarded it. And then we were on the path to nonprofit incorporation.
Maggie, that is really fascinating, and it's interesting to hear how a crisis of COVID-19 drew a lot of you together. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like it was beneficial in terms of the work you were doing. And it may have also had some personal benefits - just being connected to other people who were in the same field. And you all were able to talk about how you were managing things. Did that take place? Was there more than just sort of, "Here's how to manage your books," or "Here's how to manage conflict"?
Maggie - For sure. The camaraderie was just incredible. Farmers market managers, it's kind of a funny position, and maybe Nora can speak to this a little bit as a farmer who sells at a farmers market, and maybe a different perspective about what a market manager does or the role they occupy. But we do a lot of different things. On any given day we can be planning special events, applying for grants, communicating with vendors, communicating with our boards. And so, to have connections, especially for me being in the Triangle where we have a lot of farmers markets, I had never really met their managers or interacted with them. And now we're total pals. It really was an opportunity for me to share experiences with people who have very similar jobs, and those jobs are often singular in their workplace.
Nora, since she called you out, I'm interested, from a farmer's perspective, I would love to hear your thoughts, and, of course, Catherine, please feel free to join in.
Nora - Yes, I'd love to share. I feel like before meeting this network, and I've only been with them since April, I have to admit that as a farmer, I showed up at the farmers market and thought that's when the market began and didn't really think much beyond who was behind making it happen until I got there. And I've learned and been humbled by how much of an oversight that is. I definitely am guilty of not appreciating all of the work that goes into making sure that farmers markets happen. And I've spent the last six months learning about all the details of things that market managers deal with that farmers have no idea. And it's similar to farmers, maybe, in that way where we wear many hats. And so, I feel like I've learned, one, to appreciate them, but, two, there's not a lot of collective appreciation by anybody that goes on for farmers markets managers. And so, I think that by them grouping together every month because it can be such a siloed experience, it just seems like this really beautiful connection where, when you do your job well as a market manager, there's nothing, like no one says a thing. No complaints mean success. And so, here's a group that can give you compliments, you can empathize with one another, and know that you have each other's back. It's just a beautiful network.
Catherine - I think also what we noticed was that many times the overlap and potentially collaborative nature amongst managers is really great. These are not competitive people. They have secrets to share about what their special events might be, and not everybody has to hold Tomato Day on the same day. Or they may know people at City Hall that are the right people for this kind of permit or may as well share these things. They're all on our same perspective. And plus, that, we found that there were many other states that had networks or associations. So, we could follow them, especially during a period of crisis and near panic as COVID was. Everybody's just glued to their screens looking for information. And the states that had robust networks or associations already in place seemed to be able to help their markets succeed really well.
Thank you all for sharing this. It's really fascinating to learn about the development of this farmers market network and to know that there are other farmers market networks in other states, and it's great to hear of the learnings that you all gained from each other within the state and across states. So, this is really helpful. I've got to ask this question. I mean, it sounds like what drew you all together was the pandemic and thinking about how to navigate policies. Now that, I pray, we're through the hard part of COVID, and I say that cautiously, what are things that are on your agenda now? What do you hope to see be different?
Maggie - Catherine kind of spoke to this. Even though farmers markets are separate spaces, our market is within 20 miles of four other farmers markets. But the goal is not to compete with them. The goal is to lift up farmers markets as accessible community spaces and viable spaces for our farmers to make direct sales. So, for us, we really want to strengthen that local food ethic across the state of North Carolina. Because selling at farmers markets is an extremely viable way that small-scale farmers can succeed in North Carolina. And so, if you have a market manager that is leaving after six months because they're overwhelmed or they haven't received a lot of institutionalized knowledge or training or what have you, then that's where we can step in and say, "We have training, we can give you information, we can share resources, we can provide a network to you." Our big, impactful goal that we're working for is having a statewide nutrition incentive program, and I think Virginia calls theirs Fresh Match. Many statewide organizations have Double Bucks, Fresh Bucks, Market Match, whatever you want to call it, where they provide a dollar-for-dollar match for nutrition incentive programs like SNAP EBT or the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. And as of right now, farmers markets in North Carolina, most of them are fending for themselves. There are a few regional systems like in the western part of the state, the Triangle area farmers markets, Mecklenburg County farmers markets, that are working together. But we really want to have a statewide network where farmers markets across North Carolina can offer nutrition incentives to shopping at farmers markets.
Thank you for that. I'm really happy to hear how you all are working towards addressing policy questions and thinking about who the farmers markets can better serve by using programs like Double Up Bucks or the nutrition incentive programs, and seeing that work across the state. Because there are some significant differences in economic realities across the state. So, that's wonderful to hear you all are doing that work. I'd just like to take a step back, and I'm going to go back to you, Maggie. Can you talk to us about the role of farmers markets in communities? What role do they play?
Maggie - We talk about this a lot in the farmers market space. Because from the outside, farmers markets are spaces of commerce. They're a space where farmers can get together. Maybe you don't realize there's a level of organization behind it. But, in reality, anyone who is a regular at farmers markets knows that they are not just a space of commerce, that they are a community space. They are a third space, and an opportunity to socialize, meet your local farmers. And at our market, we were founded in the late '70's, we have customers who have been coming to our market for decades. They've known some of our farms for years, they've seen them get married and have kids, they've seen their loved ones pass away, they've seen them go through hardships, and seen them go through multiple recessions at this point. It's a really unique space, especially in this kind of era where there is an increasingly globalized economy where you can order one-day shipping for everything you need. To be able to meet the person that's growing your food or baking your bread is really unique. Many farmers markets promote the sense of community, and engagement between consumer and producer. A lot of us offer different types of community programming to kind of bolster that. So, things like kids' activities, encouraging healthy nutrition and things like senior days, educational events. Catherine named Tomato Day, which happens to be a very big day for us. And we've kind of touched on Double Bucks and food access, and that's another real priority for a farmers market. And, also, I didn't mention this when we were talking about the pandemic, but we were looped under grocery stores as essential for the state of North Carolina. And so, that kind of maybe speaks to how we feel, and I hope others in our community feel about farmers markets as well.
Wow, that's really fascinating. I didn't appreciate that farmers markets were treated like grocery stores as essential workers. That's really interesting. I'm intrigued, Nora and Catherine, what about your thoughts about the role that farmers markets may play in communities?
Catherine - Well, Nora would agree with that. The farmers are their own community, and they appreciate the opportunity to meet each other across the aisle, across the tables. "How's things going on your farm?" "Let me tell you about what's happening at my place." Farming can be a really solitary profession. There's many, many hours spent as just one person on a tractor, one person planting seeds, one person weeding. To have the camaraderie and the opportunity to meet up with your peers, that's pretty powerful on a Saturday morning. It is a lot of time sometimes to give up. The better farmers markets, of course, are the ones where you're talking directly to the farmer. How did they prepare this soil, or are they certified naturally grown? What does that mean to them on their farm? You get to actually have that conversation with a client, but only in person. So, it's a big deal for the farmer.
Nora - Yes, for sure. I can speak to that. I feel like most farmers don't have a lot of neighbors close by, and we can feel isolated in our own little work bubbles. And so, a farmers market is the social event of the week for us. Many markets that I have been a part of will have a standing lunch afterwards, and it develops into friendships that are really deep. I also wanted to just mention, from the farmer perspective, the value of meeting customers who are purchasing things from me and my farm, from others and their farms. It's not just meet your farmer, but for us it's like meet your customers. And it's a chance to explain something, like why you're excited about the diversity of such and such crops, why it matters. There's only so much you can put into website descriptions and social media, and it's just two-dimensional. Having the opportunity to meet and share space, the farmers market is so essential, I think, to not only understanding our food and where it comes from and how it's produced, but increasing our value of it in this day where it seems like food is sometimes just an afterthought of convenience.
I love the idea of the farmers market being sort of like the water cooler for farmers to get together and swap stories and share in each other's joys and probably also frustrations and pains. I can imagine how that's a wonderful space for folks. I remember watching a farmers market, I was staying in a hotel, and this is how I can say it. They were there at five in the morning, and I was like, "What's all this noise?" And it was great to see all of these farmers, one, setting up, but then I could see some of those exchanges. I had a sense of like there was a real community there. So, that's wonderful. And this makes it clear that these farmers markets can be really beneficial for farmers. I'm interested to hear a little bit more on how farmers markets are supportive, if at all, to the financial wellbeing of farmers? Or is this just a labor of love? Is it just the water cooler?
Nora - I feel like they're super economically important, and I think where I would say most importantly is as new and beginning farmers who are establishing their businesses. It is an extremely unique place to be able to try out different produce offerings and pricing. It's like you're practicing everything before you're able to have a reputation to secure accounts that might be other versions of direct or indirect marketing. And so, farmers markets offer you that opportunity to gain instant feedback: "Did that sell, yes or no?" "What were the questions?" "What were the gripes?" It gives you constant feedback to be able to refine as you grow your business and make decisions for the coming years. That's not only important as a farmer independently, I was also involved with some farmer-training programs, and we really highlighted farmers markets as giving that opportunity.
That's a great insight, that it's almost like a farmer incubator. It helps farmers test out different marketing means.
Nora - 100%, yes.
I would love to hear from some of the others. Catherine, Maggie, what are your thoughts about the financial benefit of farmers markets?
Catherine - We keep talking about it, how it's so perfect for the farmer or for the producer but think of how perfect it is also for the shopper to keep coming to a place that's always trying to reinvent itself in serving better and better and better food. My local brick-and-mortar store doesn't do that. There are different priorities.
I am an economist. I am just loving this idea of price discovery in the market and the idea that each of these markets are different and they're idiosyncratic and there's something new happening. This is actually worthy of further study, but that's another conversation for another time. So, thank you for sharing.
Catherine - I think you know probably better than most that farming is not a get-rich-quick scheme by any means. There are many examples of people, friends, who are pouring their heart and soul and muscles and fingernails into growing better and better, and they have to love it. They don't usually pay themselves terribly well.
Maggie - Many of our farmers sell at multiple markets, and it's kind of funny to hear things like: "Oh, I can always sell my cucumbers at the Carrboro farmer's market, but I can never sell them at another market." It's so funny to think about how the different farmers markets are literally different economic markets, where our customer base has like their own kind of idiosyncratic interests, and maybe they love persimmons or something like that. At our farmers market, we're definitely an incubator farmers market.
I want to ask one last question. And I say it's last, and we will see how the conversation goes. Because this has been really a delight. For market managers and farmers, what does the North Carolina Farmers Market Network have to offer them? Catherine, why don't you begin?
Catherine - Just like seeing your friendly farmer neighbors in person on Saturday morning, it's also really fun and informational, educational, all those great words, to Zoom with the managers. We have a first Thursday of the month Zoom call to the managers who are members. We have a range of topics prepared. We have space for updates on legislature. We had somebody come in from Senior WIC to help us learn what they're doing for us. How to collect data from your farmers markets is really helpful for boards and municipalities and us as the network. We're going to be asking for data. How to send out a census. What's everybody doing for the kids programs that's new, haven’t been tried before? So, that Thursday morning event has a good deal of value, we think. We also have a connection to Farmers Market Network, and we'll be able to offer discounts on insurances, I believe, as well as membership and access to their resource library, which is immense. We also wanted to make sure you knew that we were seeing other states like Virginia teach their managers best practices and have a market-management certificate, something we hope we can offer someday. We certainly will be hosting regional meetings to get to know the managers better. We have five regions around North Carolina. That'll be pretty educational. That'll have a program for it.
Nora - I would love to add to Catherine's description that in addition to being a place where farmers market managers come together, we're also a network that invites others who work in the food system and who are passionate about the same issues to become members. They're valuable voices to include in every conversation. For example, just the other week I sent out something, kind of a newsletter. I had some questions that market managers had been asking me about food-safety regulation issues for farmers markets, which comes up a lot. And in the responses, others who worked with NC State or Extension roles, piping in saying, "I have a good resource for that," or "Here's the answer." And I feel like the value of bringing together all these voices in the same room is huge.
Maggie - I love all of what Catherine and Nora were saying. You know, it occurs to me also that there are over 200 farmers markets in North Carolina. Supporting farmers markets is part of supporting North Carolina's agricultural fabric. It's part of supporting small-scale family farms, organic farms, spray-free farms. So, I think that if we can assist with marketing those farms and farmers markets, that feels very important and impactful to me. And then I also want to draw us back to education for larger stakeholders and maybe government organizations about some of our statewide initiatives like Double Bucks. I think that's where we can really offer a collective kind of impact, where maybe individual farmers markets don't have the capacity to work with larger stakeholders, but as a network we can come together and we can really have a much broader impact.
Bios
Maggie Funkhouser is currently serving as the interim Board Chair of the North Carolina Farmers Market Network. She is the Manager of the Carrboro Farmers’ Market in Carrboro, NC, where she has worked since 2019. She was raised in North Carolina’s Triangle and has worked in local food systems there for many years, including as an educator, gardener, baker, and foodservice industry worker before coming to the farmers market. She carries with her a love of writing, language, and storytelling from her classical education background, and she is drawn to foodways stories and oral histories. She is especially interested in the intersection of food access and farmers markets, as well as learning more about making farmers’ markets inclusive, equitable, and accessible community spaces.
Catherine Elkins has long enjoyed the spirit and joy of farmers markets, starting in Pennsylvania visiting several Amish markets and continuing in North Carolina after moving to Chapel Hill. She volunteered for many years at the Carrboro Farmers' Market, and then after retirement, stole many of their successful strategies when designing, starting and managing the Olde Beaufort Farmers' Market. She also assists with the Carteret Local Food Network's Mobile Market which operates a red short school bus tricked out to serve many low income and senior communities in Carteret County with the freshest, most local produce and farm products from Carteret farmers.
Nora Rodli is the Program Coordinator for the NC Farmers Market Network. She brings over 25 years of agricultural experience from working as a farmer and with farmer training and education. She also has a healthcare background as an advanced public health nurse (APHN). Currently living and farming in Boone, NC, Nora is passionate about the primary roles that local food and increased access to local food can play in health promotion and disease prevention, resilient local food systems and vibrant inclusive communities.
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It has been said many times that a picture is worth a thousand words. Our guest today is documentary photographer Sally Thomson, the creative genius behind the book "Homeground." She hopes her photos of 24 ranchers and land managers can broaden people's understanding of the impact conservation ranching has on the health of the land, the animals, and the people who live, work, and recreate in Southwestern and Rocky Mountain rangelands. Her book also includes rancher quotes and essays from land managers working to address challenges of climate change and diminishing resources and to find sustainable land management solutions.
Interview Summary
I was especially interested in doing this podcast because we've had a lot of people on to talk about regenerative agriculture and there have been farmers and ranchers, some of whom we both know in common. There have been scientists who work on this, people who work with NGOs trying to promote this work, and even some policy makers, but never a photographer. It's going to be really interesting to hear from you and I look forward to what you have to say. So, we have spoken to chefs and filmmakers before who've used their arts to shape and change the food system. But as I say, you're the first photographer we've spoken to. Let's go back to the beginning. What got you interested in photography in the first place, and how can photography be used as a social or political statement?
Well, I didn't start out to become a photographer. I took a art class in college and that is really what first introduced me to photography. I was gifted a used cannon camera and a couple of lenses and I started experimenting with the camera. And I was immediately drawn to the medium. Especially watching the images kind of emerge in the dark room was just fascinating and kind of magical. But it never really occurred to me to consider photography as a career. I eventually went on to graduate school and I studied landscape architecture following my interest in environmental design and planning. I figured this would also give me the opportunity to incorporate photography into my creative process. I practiced landscape architecture for many years. But it wasn't until much later that I realized the power photography can have in storytelling, and raising awareness, and connecting me with people in places that, you know, I wouldn't have otherwise thought possible. So, up until about this point, I had used photography more for documenting my work. I had worked for a conservation organization in the Amazon Rainforest, and in order to communicate their message, I felt that photography was extremely useful in doing that. That's really what caused that shift in my thinking of turning to photography. In 2008, I created On Focus Photography, which was an effort to highlight the work of various underrepresented environmental cultural NGOs. I set about trying to learn everything I could about documentary photography at that point. That sort of led me to where I am today. What I do today is primarily divide my time between freelance assignment work, fine art and documentary photography.
Thanks for that background. It's really helpful to understand how you got to where you are now. So, let's turn to your book, "Homeground" brand new. Can you provide an overview of the book and what are some of the key things that you're hoping to convey?
Well, Homeground, of course, is a visual narrative. It explores the endangered rangelands of the American Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, and the people and the practices that are involved in restoring and sustaining these landscapes. I think one of the things that was kind of startling to me was the account of our rangelands, and I just wanted to talk about that briefly. Rangelands account for the largest share of the nation's land base. They cover more than one third of the land service in the continental US and that's according to USDA data. Unlike pastureland, rangelands consist of native vegetation, and they include a wide variety of different landscape types such as grasslands, desert shrub lands, and so on. They provide essential habitats for all kinds of living creatures, forage for livestock, and recreational opportunities. But in this country and elsewhere around the world, I learned that these lands are threatened due to land conversion, unmanaged grazing, invasive species, climate change, and things like that. The Nature Conservancy, in fact, says that grasslands represent the most threatened and least protected habitat on earth. Less than 2% worldwide and just 4% in the United States receive any kind of formal protection.
So, thinking about the Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, as you probably know, they connect vast areas of habitat and there are all kinds of organizations, federal, state, private and tribal ownership that form this mosaic of pattern on the land. But private individuals own more than half of the nation's range lands. The federal government manages about 40%, and state and local governments and tribal councils manage the remainder. I found these numbers were rather compelling, and it sort of put, for me, into perspective not only the scale and significance of these landscapes but point to the important role private land managers play in caring for this huge amount of land in our country.
There's a lot at stake, isn't there? Given how much land you're talking about and the importance of it to environment and everything else.
It is. And there's a map in the book that shows that distribution. It was based on data collected by USDA, but it was interpreted by Dave Merrill, who works for Bloomberg. It's just very insightful when you see that big square of rangeland and you realize how much landmass that really is. So, that really struck me and I wanted to make sure that people understood that.
Let's get back to the themes of your book, because I'm dying to hear about them. But tell me first, what inspired you to take on the issue of regenerative agriculture in particular?
I've always been deeply interested in the relationship between people and environment, and sort of how our actions can shape and impact the landscapes that we live in. When I moved to New Mexico in 2013, I'm originally from the East and went to school in North Carolina as a matter of fact. I got a job helping a local nonprofit organization called the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance here in Santa Fe, SWGLA for short. I helped them to produce a short video about how some producers were beginning to manage their animals on the land by utilizing a method called Holistic Planned Grazing. This was a term first introduced by Alan Savory, decades earlier. So, for this project, I visited six ranches spread across the states of New Mexico, and Colorado and Arizona. Traveled all around interviewing these ranchers. And through that experience, I grew a deep appreciation for these people, the men and women who managed these vast and often very remote tracks of land, and their dedication to regenerating some of the most incredible degraded landscapes that I've seen. I was inspired by their dedication and their determination, and I continued to visit and photograph over the years dozens of ranches and others who worked toward improving the ecological health of our rangelands. I guess you could say that the book "Homeground" was my pandemic project because I'd always wanted to find a way to share these images and the information that I had accumulated over the years. The lockdown kind of gave me time to sit down and think about how to organize and present what I had learned. So, around 2021, I decided that I was going to create this book and it would be titled "Homeground." Home alluding to a place of belonging and identity relating to the land. This seemed appropriate for me and the way of life that I wanted to feature.
Sally, you mentioned Alan Savory and I wanted to make a note to remind our listeners that we've recorded a podcast with Alan Savory that's part of our series on regenerative agriculture. And, the person who connected the two of us, Nancy Ranney, a rancher in New Mexico, and I know somebody you know well also has been a guest for part of our podcast series, both very impressive people. So, now let's talk a little bit more about the book and some of the choices you made in producing it. Some of the book's photographs are in black and white and some are in color, that's an interesting choice you've made. Can you share some insights about the process of selecting and capturing images, why you did some in color, some in black and white, and how did these reflect the principles of regenerative ranching?
I've had a few exhibitions that revolve around this work, and most of those were all done in black and white. When I started putting the book together, I felt because you're up close and personal looking at these images, that color would be good in moving you along the story. Also, some of the images were old, some were taken back in 2013, some were taken in 2022 and 2023. So, it was sort of a way to differentiate the flow of the work. Along with the images, there are three essays in the book that are written by well-known land managers in the region. Nancy Rainey provided one of the essays on community engagement, Bob Budd, who works in Wyoming, and Tony Berg, who has also worked in Wyoming but is now in Oregon, and he's a mentor with the Savory Institute. Each of them provided insightful personal accounts of their experiences in regenerative ranching, highlighting themes of the book, which are the importance of rangeland biodiversity, healthy soils, and community engagement. Ranchers also have some quotations in the book, but I worked quite closely with various state federal agencies and local nonprofits and academic institutions, and there's a lot happening out there in terms of all these other people that are involved in helping ranchers to manage their lands more sustainably. So, some of those are like the Covera Coalition, the Western Landowners Alliance, Holistic Management International, and of course Alan Savory Institute. It's a very complex and interesting world that is evolving and growing, fortunately.
Well, that's so true. I mean, if you go back just a few years even, there's a lot less knowledge about these sorts of approaches to ranching and agriculture, and now a lot more people are talking about it, thinking about it, studying it, writing about it, and photographing it, which is really wonderful. You mentioned that the work took place over a period of 10 years. Are there any specific stories or experiences from this journey you had that you found particularly impactful or enlightening?
Every time I set foot on a ranch, it was impactful. And it's hard to separate out just one story, but one of the most interesting experiences, I think we talk a lot about holistic grazing and how it tries to mimic the bison that roamed hundreds of years ago on the land. I had an opportunity to go out and visit one of Ted Turner's ranches in Central New Mexico where they were having a bison roundup. I rode out into this landscape, which was like actually transporting myself back 200 years where there were no cars, no telephone poles, just the land and the animals. It was pretty fascinating to see those bison, 500 of them roaming across the landscape. When I was out there also, there was a herd of antelopes and another herd of elk. So, I really felt privileged to be out on that land and to witness, almost like stepping back into history.
There are a lot of young people now that are getting involved, which is really great because there was a time when it seemed like people talked about ranching dying. And there have been organizations like the Covera Coalition that have really worked hard to get young people involved in now there's a lot of interest. And not just amongst doing ranching work, but also in the scientific and academic communities. And so, I was able to work with some scientists from the University of Colorado and they were working in robotics of all things, using these robots to monitor the ground and collect data on the temperature of the soil, the composite of the soil, all sorts of things.
Another ranch I went to in Lamar, Colorado, they had reintroduced the black-footed ferret, an endangered species, that almost went extinct in the 1980s and they were bringing back to, you know, regenerate the soil in that part of the country. So, I actually went out with a team of scientists at night because they're nocturnal animals and the only time you can see them and that they can figure out what they're doing and where they're living, and how they're living is to spot them at night. They ride around from maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night until the early hours of the morning searching for these black-footed ferrets. They'll stick their heads up out of a hole in the ground, but they're determined. And that determination and that interest was really exciting to see.
You paint a wonderful picture of all this when you were talking about the bison and being transported 200 years in the past created this very vivid image in my mind, and I can imagine how powerful it must have been to be there and how wonderful it is that you've captured this in your photographs. It is just so important that this kind of work gets communicated. One of the reasons I'm delighted that you did your book. Let me ask you a final question. How do you envision your book contributing to the broader conversation about regenerative agriculture and ranching, and the sustainable use of land, and what do you hope readers will take away?
I think the book provides a broad understanding to a very complex issue. Sometimes those issues are difficult to understand because they're wound up in a lot of statistics, or the media is not reporting accurately, or even reporting at all on the issue. I'm hoping that a book like this that shows photographs will draw people in to want to understand more. The other thing I wanted to mention was that these land managers that I have met, they understand that ranching and healthy systems go hand in hand, and making the regenerative transition is a slow, and it's a complex process. There are no quick fixes, there's no one size fits all answers. And that's most likely true, I would say, for anyone, anywhere who's trying to make that regenerative switch. In our fast-paced world, it seems like that nothing is happening, but it just takes time. That's one thing that I can see over this 10-year period is I can see a change. That's pretty gratifying.
Grasslands in particular are very overlooked ecosystem in our country, but they play a crucial role in guarding against climate change. And one thing that amazed me was that a three-foot-tall grassland plant has a root system that extends more than three to four times below the surface of the earth. And those deep roots work to stabilize and they nourish the soil and can sequester huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. So, rangelands are important in that way, and I think it's important for people to understand about that. Another thing is that I think our Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Rangelands, they're a part of our collective history and legacy, and their landscapes that provide us all with clean water and clean air. They offer us respite and recreational opportunities. And in our world now where 80% of the population resides in urban areas, it's pretty easy for us to overlook what we don't encounter every day. It's my hope that "Homeground" will engage viewers from across the country to consider the significance of regenerative ranching and its potential benefits to all of us regarding climate and conservation, wildlife, and food production.
Well, what an important goal. So good luck looking forward. So, for people who are listening, who'd like to obtain a copy of the book, how should they go about doing that?
They can go onto my website: sallythomsonphotography.com.
Bio
Sally Thomson is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work explores the relationship between nature and culture and how that forms our perception and expression of where and how we live. Thomson's previous experiences in landscape architecture and conservation planning inform her work as a photographer, which aims to inspire the conservation and regeneration of endangered environments and the cultural legacies they support. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from North Carolina State University School of Design. She is the Past President (2017-2021) of the American Society of Media Photographers New Mexico Board of Directors.
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Our guest today is Jasmine Crowe-Houston, social entrepreneur, and founder of Goodr.co. Jasmine started her journey cooking soul food for hungry unhoused people in her kitchen in her one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta. She fed upwards of 500 people a week for years with pop-up kitchens and parks and parking lots. Then in 2017, she founded Goodr, a technology-based food waste management company that connects firms with food surpluses to nonprofit organizations that can use the food. She has worked with organizations that have food waste issues, such as the Atlanta International Airport, Hormel Foods, and Turner Broadcasting. Today, Goodr has expanded nationwide and sponsors free grocery stores and schools. She has combined charity, innovation, and market-based solutions into a for-profit waste management company that Inc. Magazine called a rare triple win.
This episode is in collaboration with Policy360, a podcast of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
Interview Summary
Would you describe what Goodr is today?
Goodr is a blessing. We are a sustainable food waste management company that leverages technology to connect businesses that have excess food to non-profit organizations that can use that food. And at the same time, we have a line of business, which is Hunger Solutions, and we're helping brands and government and other municipalities rethink how hunger is solved in their communities. We believe that hunger is not an issue of scarcity. It's really a matter of logistics. And so, we are using technology and logistics to drive out hunger and food waste. We've built technology that includes our mobile app and portal. Imagine you are using an Uber Eats or DoorDash app. You go onto your favorite restaurant; you click the item that you want. Similar experience for our users. So, for example, a restaurant in the airport. Their menu is in our system. They click chicken sandwich; they tell us 50. Our platform is going to calculate the tax value of those sandwiches, the approximate weight of those sandwiches, and our algorithm is automatically matching those sandwiches with the non-profit that is serving 50 or more people that can take those items and then get it distributed to people in need. Another big thing that our technology is capturing is the poundage that we're keeping out a landfill. So, it's really important because we're able to tell our clients we have kept 2 million pounds of food from landfills. This is equal to this much CO2 emissions that you've helped to prevent. We do a lot of fun gamifications as well, but we're data-driven and we believe that you can't manage what you don't measure. And for too long, people have thrown everything away. They've never measured it. And now we're giving them real insights and they're seeing things like, wow, my number one wasted thing is pork. Why am I making pork so much? Maybe people here at our offices don't eat pork. Start to make changes. So, we really work on the source reduction, but the number two on the EPA is the food hierarchy chart is feeding hungry people. And so that's really where we are.
Wow, that's amazing. I want to ask because I've seen this in the food waste and food donation world, that sometimes food that's donated isn't appropriate or fit for human consumption. What happens to those food products?
Traditionally, they end up in landfills. One of the big things that we have to do at Goodr, and I'll tell you too, that change is by county. So, think of not by city, not by state. Wake County and Durham County probably have different rules because it's based off the health department in each city. So, a good example is when we were working in Florida, what we do in Miami is absolutely illegal in Fort Lauderdale. They're 10 minutes away from each other. Broward County and Dade County have different rules. So, we spend a lot of time, our R&D team, creating quality assurance checklists. And we know this food is going to live for three hours. So, you've got to get this either cooled, frozen, or donated within three hours. So, we tell our businesses that. We are moving food in an average of about 30 minutes from the time it gets picked up. Some of our customers will put in their pickup requests and ask that it's picked up the next morning. So, they're going to automatically put it in their refrigerator. That's their comfort level. They feel a lot better. It makes the food last longer and they don't always have to worry about it being fresh. A lot of the time when we're dealing with weddings, really big events, that's when we have to move right away because maybe that business doesn't have access to the kitchen the next day. And so, we need to move a little bit differently. Most of the time when a business has food that's passed that timeframe, they typically do throw it away. But what we've done is we've introduced organics recycling into our fold. So, our customers now have the ability to send that to an animal farm. We can also send it to an anaerobic digester and turn it into an organic product, or we can compost it. We're still keeping it out of landfill. It doesn't have to end up in landfill ever. That's the positive.
Yeah, that's amazing. I saw your 2019 Ted women talk entitled "What We're Getting Wrong in The Fight to End Hunger". And it has been viewed by more than 2.2 million times.
Wow. Yeah, it's so good. I didn't know if you gave me those last million, but that's good to know.
Good job! No, it was over that by the time I got to it, but it's really amazing and I'm just intrigued to get your opinion about why do you think people are interested in solving hunger and food waste?
I think people are questioning why it hasn't been solved yet. It's almost like it's not as big as cancer, right? But it's as big as cancer. Cancer's big, it kills people, right? But we spend a lot of money and there's a lot of research and we feel like we're getting closer to the fight. I don't know if people feel that we're getting closer to the fight as it relates to hunger. And if you think about it, Norbert, when me and you were kids, we probably did a canned food drive. Anybody that's listening right now is probably thinking, "I did some kind of a food drive when I was in elementary school to solve hunger in our communities." Why are we still doing that? Why are we still doing the same things? I always look at it as being the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I think that's what people are interested in. What are we getting wrong? Why is my kid, 35 years later, why am I still doing canned food drives for my kindergarten kid and this is something that I did in kindergarten? And is this moving the needle? Is this really working? People want to know that. People want to know are we pacifying problems or is the money that we're putting behind these actually driving solutions and should we look at something else that's different? Even with my TED Talk, I remember the first week it came out, we got a lot of, "Oh, you're talking negatively about food banks, and they do great work and I volunteer at the food bank every weekend." There's a whole section in my TED Talk where I say food banks and food pantries are vital. They play a pivotal role, but they don't solve hunger alone, and we need to be open to doing new things. We're using technology in every other area of our lives. I mean, we're getting our groceries delivered, we're meeting our spouses, we're going to college. Why are we not using technology to try and solve a big problem like hunger and food waste? And so, it's just getting people open. I think that's what people are interested in finding a solution.
I'm really intrigued by the model of Goodr, the fact that it is a for-profit company. What's also interesting is given all the success that you've had up to this point, it's hard to believe now that investors hesitated to support you.
Yeah, shame on those investors, I would say. I'll tell you, Norbert, the sad thing is, right, any woman listening should know this. Women as a whole get 2% of all venture capital funding from investors as a whole. So, you take a pie and then you take 2%, and now of that 2%, you have women that are Asian, women that are Black, women that are Hispanic, women that are White. We're all taking a piece of that small 2%. So, there's part of that. I think another thing is it's hard to sometimes get conviction around that, which you don't understand. And a lot of investors, quite frankly, have never been hungry, you know? They don't really understand food waste. It's probably not... It's not AI, it's not blockchain, it's not crypto. It's not always in the headlines. It's not the cool thing. So, I think those all played a factor in it. I think that's just the reality. Investors like to invest in things that they can get excited about, and sometimes hunger and food waste just are not exciting. I also think a lot of people felt like this is so good, they should be a nonprofit. And for me, I saw the business case in what we were building right away because businesses were already paying to throw food away. That's the simple thing about it. So why would I create a nonprofit and must ask everyday people to donate so that we can get this food picked up, have to rely on volunteers that may or may not come, which possibly would cause more food to go to waste. Because if you're being paid to pick something up, you're being paid to do something, you're 99% more likely to go, right? If you're volunteering and it's raining, you may not go that day. It doesn't matter how much you care about the cause. You may not want to get in your car, you may not like to drive in the rain. Those are the things that happen. And so I also believe that businesses would value what they pay for. So, if you're investing and you're paying in a service to divert your food waste from landfill, you're more likely to make sure that your employees are actually packaging that food, recording it for donations, scheduling pickups, than you would be if it was just a free thing, and it was a nice to do. I think that was kind of like we needed to prove that, and now we've proven. We have world-class customers. We work with... You name some of them. And I mean, we've worked with everybody from the NBA to Google to Oracle, Nike World Headquarters. These are our customers, you know? People have now seen that this works. One of our biggest customers, they sent over a testimonial the other day and it says, "All the other locations are banging down my door to try and get Goodr." People just needed to give it a try. And so now hopefully when we have those investor conversations the next go around, this market's a little crazy, but hopefully we'll have a bit more willingness to give our solution a try. And there have been great investors who have made an investment in what we're doing.
Right. Thank you for sharing that. And we're at a university and we have a lot of young people who are excited about social entrepreneurship. What can you say to them to encourage them along this path?
I could say to them that they are needed. We were talking about my goal of wanting to be a professor one day, and what I want to talk about is social entrepreneurship and this model of being able to do well by doing good. That there is a way to do that in business and that it ultimately works. And we've seen the big companies that I think are pretty keen and they've seen success for are your Warby Parkers, your Patagonias. These are other B Corps, Goodr is a B Corp as well, who are kind of existing. The first model I ever saw of social entrepreneurship was Toms Shoes. They were really popular maybe 15 years ago, maybe not as much now, but there was a point when it was like, I'm going to buy a shoe and give a shoe. Bombas, the sock and undergarment company, the same thing. They're supporting homelessness. You buy a sock, you're giving a sock, you buy a T-shirt, you're giving a T-shirt. People love to do good. And so, these students that are interested in creating ways and solutions to solve some of our biggest problems, are needed now more than ever. I mean, this world is... I read an article the other day talking about all that millennials have lived through. And I was thinking to myself, goodness gracious, I've lived through a lot, two recessions, a couple of wars, a pandemic, just like everything, technology. I mean, that's the reality of it. I don't recall a smart cell phone when I was in high school and college. That was... I think the iPhone came out maybe in 2008, 2009. I graduated college by then. I didn't have that. Facebook wasn't around until 2008. You start to see what's happening to young people now because of social media, their self-esteem, the anxiety. There are so many things that we need people to be addressing because we're creating a lot more technology, but we're also creating a lot more problems, and they need to be solved.
They do. And it is interesting to think about the anxiety that's associated with some of these issues.
Oh yes.
And the fact that Goodr is trying to address food waste, which is a contributor climate change, I mean, you're providing a solution. And this is great and it helps me think that our students can start to think differently about what they can do to help address these issues.
The Project Drawdown, which is pretty much a leading climate solutions organization, they named, in 2022, food waste. Reducing our food waste is number two after fixing our energy grid. Number two thing that we could do to combat climate change is to reduce our food waste. In America, nearly 2% of GDP has been on food we never eat, which is just insane to think about. 2% of everything that we spend is on food we never eat, from production to transportation to the disposal. And so even around the food waste chain, there's still a lot more solutions that are needed. So even if that's going to be what we're producing at the farm level, what's going to waste? What can we do with it? Can we reuse it? Can we turn things into other products? I was reading an article recently about there's a new kind of leather that's going to be... It's already kind of on some runways, but it's made out of banana peels. That’s a social entrepreneur that thought of that.
I love the fact that you're so welcoming and you're trying to bring people in. And that brings up the book that you've published recently, "Everybody Eats," and it's there to inspire young people in the fight against hunger. It is beautiful. And I see my daughter in this text and so I'm really appreciative of it. And it was illustrated by Nadia Fisher. And there is also a website with resources for parents and kids and teachers. What do you want to accomplish with this outreach effort?
I am often asked, will I solve hunger in my lifetime? I want to say yes, but I have to think possibly not. Hunger grows every single year. I mean, there's a new study I just was reading that it was in the Washington Post two days ago. It's increased 12%. Childhood poverty is up 20%. So sometimes I'm going, or you make the shot, we're at Duke, right? This is a basketball place. So, you make this shot and you can't keep your hand there because the team is already down, the other team's already on the other side of the court. That's often how I feel about hunger. It's like I do something that's really good. It's monumental. We've got grocery stores in schools, we're feeding students, and then I read that childhood poverty is up 20%. How do I leave a legacy that really focuses on solving hunger? I need to inform the next generation and I need to do it in a way, and how I wrote that book is really my story in the eyes of a kid. Me learning that one of my friends, my college roommate did not have food in her household, and that shaping my whole life. And now thinking like your daughter, what would she come back and tell you if she learned that a friend of hers at school doesn't have food in her kitchen like you have food in your kitchen? And they ask questions, and they want to understand that. She goes on this journey asking grocery stores and her school like, "Hey, what's going on with this food? People are going hungry. My friend at school doesn't have access to food," and she's trying to help her friend. And the reality is just like with my friend and the young protagonist in the book, her father just lost the job. I mean, so many people read these stories. I think the most recent article I saw said something like 75% of Americans are living... Are one paycheck away, just one paycheck away. And to see that, that happened to my friend, and it's the most jarring thing that has ever happened to me, probably in life. Because I had a completely different picture in my mind of what hunger looked like until that happened to me. And this happened to me probably three years into feeding people that were experiencing homelessness on the street. I've been feeding people for over a decade of my life. To learn that someone who had volunteered with me, someone who had been out feeding people with me, that they too wouldn't have food in their home, it changed my whole life and my life story. I use all the proceeds from the book to fund a Neighborhood Eats program where I feed kids on the weekends, and I know that I'm making an impact in the lives of children. And they will. My hope is in 15, 20 years, you'll be sitting here talking to someone else who's doing something around this. That's the goal.
You've touched on this, but I just want to push it a little bit further. Food waste and hunger are longstanding challenges and they touch people all along the supply chain. How do you manage the complexity of this problem?
Yeah, I think we have to continue to focus on the verticals that we're really good at because it is big. You'll probably think I'm lying to you, Norbert. I may get a hundred phone calls and emails a week. "Hey, we need Goodr here. We want it... How can I bring this here? Can I bring this to my community? I need food. My senior home needs food. The trailer park that we live in, a lot of us are... It's rural. We're not near a grocery store." I look at myself as trying... I think it's like hero overload. I'm trying to solve all this. How do I get to Canada? Oh, someone just called me from Denmark. How do we go to Denmark? How do we get here? I think what I have to really focus on is US first. I do really well with large scale venues, colleges and universities, enterprise corporate cafeterias, stadiums and arenas, airports, convention centers, places where there's a lot of food in one location. A lot of people wonder, why don't you go to small restaurants? We get calls from, "Hey, we have a deli in Long Island, New York," And we're like, "Hey, we're not there yet, but here's our resource guide for how you can donate food. Here's organizations that you can look for in your community. Here are ways you can create your own food donation programs." We try and give them resources to still solve the problem while realizing that we can't do it all ourselves. And I could tell you as an entrepreneur and as a social entrepreneur, that's the hardest thing ever. Because at first, when I first started Goodr, I'm very happy people in Canada didn't call me then because I probably would've been from Atlanta to Vancouver, and just missing a whole other part of the process. But you've got to follow the process and you've got to get really good at something and then drill in and just become the best at it. The best in class. And that's what we... When we have our all-hands meetings and our team retreats, we talk about what are we the best at? And we also say are there things that we're doing that we're not good at? And to your point, that's why I said I'm inviting other people in, right? Because I know that there's other use cases. We don't work with grocery stores. That's something that's really fascinating to a lot of people. I spent probably the first six months of customer discovery, when I was really trying to figure out who are going to be the Goodr customers that we're going to pitch to of working with trying to work with grocery stores. And what I learned is the two largest grocers in the country created and kind of funded Feeding America. There's a strong system there. I was like, okay, they've got that. Now I'm still trying to work with them on prepared foods. That's my hope with the grocery stores now is those rotisserie chickens, those are the things that don't get donated and so that's what we're really trying to focus on. But the shelf stable things, the produce items, they have a strong solution for that. And it took me six months of trying and hitting roadblocks to see that sometimes people don't want to change what they feel like they've focused on. I had to go and say, okay, well where's the food not going? Where's it missing? And I realized it was prepared foods. And that's why I'm really trying to stay on those rotisserie chickens at these grocery stores, because I think if a parent can get a rotisserie chicken, you could pull some other things together. The meat is kind of what you really need.
So how do you stay inspired?
I try and keep my eye on the prize. I got an email from a lady and her name was Bertha, so I've assumed that she was a senior. Her email said to me, Norman, "I just want to thank you guys for your food today. When I got home, my meat wasn't brown. It was fresh and everything was good. And it came from good stores, I could tell it was quality." And I'll never forget that because I thought just imagine, she's saying I got meat that's fresh. That's her thing. I'm hungry. I'm getting food from your organization and it's good, and I'm shocked by that. So shocked that I needed to send an email to say, "Hey, when I got home today, you gave me something that was good." So that's the stuff that I think keeps me going. I got another email from a lady; this is when we were doing a lot of work. We did a ton of work around hunger during the pandemic if you can imagine. And her email was just like, "I was sitting on my porch, my kids were sleeping, they were napping. And my only thought was what am I going to feed these kids when they wake up? because they're going to wake up hungry. Kids ask me for snacks. We're running low, we don't have anything. And I get a call from a driver named Jarvis who says, 'I'm around the corner. This is Goodr. I've got this food delivery.' And not only did he bring a box of food for my family, but he also brought me a pizza that was warm." because we had... I think Papa John's at the time was giving us pizzas, this is heavy in the heat of the pandemic, to deliver boxes of food that we were bringing to families. And she was just like, "This was a godsend." And she said that we gave her hope in her darkest hour, and I'll never forget that. Those are two emails, and I think both of those emails are from 2020, 2021, that still are in my head today. I think about that as a guiding light to continue to keep going and just knowing that we are really making change.
Bio
Jasmine Crowe-Houston is the creator of Goodr, a tech-enabled sustainable food waste management company that strives to eliminate hunger and save food from landfills. Through her years of work feeding vulnerable populations, Jasmine saw a great opportunity for technology to solve a real problem: hunger. In January 2017, Jasmine founded Goodr, a food management platform that allows users in the food industry to track and redirect surplus food. She's a proud alumna of North Carolina Central University. A resident of Atlanta, Georgia, she enjoys spending time with her family and friends and being a new mom to her daughter Journey. She is an avid traveler who has visited more than 30 countries. Jasmine sits on several nonprofit boards and continues to use her time for good. She was named by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the top 100 influential female founders and recognized on the Black Enterprise 40 Under 40 List.
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Stories from the past help us understand who we are and who we can be. In today's podcast, we will explore a gripping new book titled "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement," written by African American Studies Assistant Professor Bobby J. Smith II at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The book tells how food was used as a political weapon against African Americans and describes how black people fought against oppressive regimes by creating their own food systems, Bobby sets the stage for understanding how black youth today in Mississippi and beyond are building food justice movements and grappling with inequalities that attempt to contort their lives.
Interview Summary
So, Bobby, what inspired you to write "Food Power Politics?"
So many different ways to answer the question. I have a family background in agriculture. I did food justice activism while I was in graduate school. I also worked on food policy councils. So, I was inspired to write it because I was already interested in understanding the ways in which food was produced, consumed, and distributed. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was actually a class I took while I was in graduate school at Cornell University in the Department of Developmental Sociology. I'm taking a course around community development and organizing and we read a book by sociologist Charles Payne entitled "I've Got the Light of Freedom." It's about the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, particularly the area called Greenwood, Mississippi in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Region of the state of Mississippi, which is the northwest quadrant of the state. And in the book, Payne talks about the organizing tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. And during that class, I'd already been interested in understanding, again, issues of food justice and food security. So, as I was reading that book, I learned about the ways in which food became a weapon used against the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights activists responded by organizing their own food programs. And essentially, I wrote "Food Power Politics" because I wanted to raise awareness about how food can be used in different ways. But I also wanted people to rethink the idea of food. Many times, people think about food as something that's on your plate or something you get at the grocery store. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was to show a different story about food and how it impacts the lives of African American people.
Thank you for that. And I have got to tell you, I'm intrigued by the phrasing of "Food Power Politics." Could you please unpack its meaning and explain how you map it across the landscape of Black life?
"Food Power Politics" is the title of my book, but it's also the theoretical framework that I created to begin to understand, or for scholars and other people to interpret, how food can be used as a weapon. The book started as ideas for my dissertation. When I first learned about the ways in which food had been used as a weapon against African American communities, I started looking to the literature to find out how have people talked about food as a weapon. I remember talking to a number of my colleagues about the book itself and they were telling me stories about how the idea of food as a weapon is just what we call wartime tactics. So, food has been weaponized for many, many years, and centuries. So, I went to the literature, and I found out that scholars, typically legal scholars, historians, and political scientists, when they talk about how food when used as a weapon, they use the term food power. I had never heard of food power before or this framework of food power. So I, of course, as a diligent graduate student, delved into the literature and learned more about food power. And it's a concept that is usually understood in the context of international conflict whereby one nation withholds food from another nation in times of conflict as a way to mitigate the impact of the conflict, or that the nation that wills the power against another nation can win the conflict. That's what they call food power. So, I used the concept of food power and transposed it into the context of the Civil Rights Movement. And while I was studying the Civil Rights Movement, food power allowed me to think about how food had been used as a weapon against African communities, but it didn't allow me to pick up on how African American communities fought back. And that was a key part for me because many times when we think about times of oppression or social struggle, we tend to think about how oppressors oppressed people and not have those who are oppressed fight back. So, when I observed what African American communities were doing in Mississippi in response to food being weaponized against them, I theorized ideally emancipatory food power, which allows or creates this way for us to understand how African American communities use food as a way to emancipate themselves from those kinds of conditions and circumstances. So, the conflict between food power and emancipatory food power equals or is a sense is where I theorize as "Food Power Politics" which captures those struggles. I didn't want to show just one side of the struggle by which food is used against African American communities. I wanted to show both sides. And that's what the concept of "Food Power Politics" seeks to do. It gives us language to understand these instances, whether it's during times of enslavement in the African American experience or in times of Jim Crow or civil rights or even today. It gives us language to understand the ways in which food is used in times of social struggle.
This is really rich. I'm so intrigued by the idea of taking from geopolitical conflict, this notion of food power and this idea of food power against, but you also talk about food power for, and that was an important move because it shows how people can take possession of their lives and use food, that can be so complicated, for their good. And so, I hope we'll talk a bit more about that. But I really want you to take us back in time. So, what is the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and why do you think it's important?
So, thinking back when I talked about Charles Payne's piece, "I've Got the Light of Freedom." He talks about how food was used as a weapon against African American communities. So, although Charles Payne's book is not about food, it's not about agriculture. It's a strictly civil rights, Black Freedom Struggle type of book. But in chapter five of the book, he recounts this moment activists now called the Greenwood Food Blockade. And the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, or the story that I want to tell, begins with this Greenwood Food Blockade. In short, it is this moment where the White political structure there in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Region through the city of Greenwood, Mississippi, in Ford County, is where they begin to use food as a form of voter suppression. So, there's this federal surplus commodities food program. Government cheese, or government peanut butter, meats, and things like that. At the time in the Delta Region of Mississippi, that program was a big program for rural African American communities. In 1962, the Florida County Board of Supervisors decides to dismantle that program. And that was the only way that our poor world Black communities were able to even get food. Many of them were sharecroppers or farm workers or day laborers, and many of them didn't have any money to buy foods. So, all the food they got and the ways in which they fed themselves was mostly through this federal surplus commodities program, which is what they call the Surplus Food Program. So, in 1962, the Florida County Board of Supervisors in November of 1962 decide to dismantle the program as a form of voter suppression. So, what ends up happening is that now activists who are in Mississippi begin to make connections between food and the struggles of sharecroppers. And so essentially the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement begins with this event called the Greenwood Food Blockade. And in response to the blockade, activists organized what they call the Food for Freedom program. So, that's one of the first times we see these tensions between food power against and food power for. The blockade itself is one where food power is used against these communities. And then the Food for Freedom program is designed to respond to that lack of food that is engineered by the Greenwood Food Blockade. That's my entry point and that's how I even found out about this food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. And in 2017 when I was a graduate student, I went to Mississippi to learn more about the Greenwood Food Blockade. I wanted to locate activists who knew about it. I went to the places where the Food for Freedom program operated, and I learned so much about the Greenwood Food Blockade. But while I was in Mississippi, I also learned about another part of this story. So, during the Greenwood Food Blockade, while activists are responding to this use of food as a form of voter suppression, there's also this food stamps campaign that is engineered by White grocery store owners in the Delta and across Mississippi. Now, I call it a food stamps campaign because in 1962, our nation did not have a Federal Food Stamp program. It was a pilot program at the time. White grocery store owners in Mississippi wanted food stamps, but not food stamps to feed people; they wanted food stamps to make profit. They also wanted to get rid of the federal surplus commodities food program because they believed that that program would cut into their profit. So, once I learned more about this Federal Food Stamps campaign in Mississippi, I soon learned that another way in which food had been used as a weapon against African American communities was also through the Federal Food Stamp Program. The Greenwood Food Blockade is food as a political weapon. And then this Federal Food Stamp campaign by White grocery store owners is food used as an economic weapon, and how activists and how sharecroppers in those communities responded to that campaign was how they developed food cooperatives. Throughout each chapter of the book, I provide a case study of how food is used as a weapon against African American communities and how they respond. But they respond in different ways because when it's a political situation, they respond by attaching food to civil rights activism and freedom. Whereas the food stamps, they realize whether we have surplus commodities or whether we have food stamps, we can't control when, where, and how we access food. In response, they start developing these food and farm cooperatives in Mississippi, and that's the way we see how food can be used as a weapon against, but also how being those communities counter weaponized. And then I follow that story and situate it through today and show how particularly Black youth in the Delta today continue the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, recognizing that things are different today and that a lot of the power structure has morphed to fit today's context. But communities are still struggling to counter weaponize the ways in which food has been used against them.
You are already leading into the next line of questioning and that's this idea why your text mostly is about historical events. You do, of course, bring it to today. And I'd like to hear you talk about this. How do you envision your book contributing to the contemporary work of food activists and their communities?
Honestly, when writing books or articles, you never know who might have access to it or who might get it. And my hope for at least communities or those who are actually on the ground doing the work around food justice or food sovereignty or any type of food movement, I want them to use the book as a part of their arsenal of stories to develop blueprints to think about the future. The reason why I wanted to end the book with thinking about Black youth, because the Black youth that I studied in the book, they were directly continuing this food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, which also showed me that there's some unanswered questions left from the past that we still need to address if we're going to create this socially just food futures. I'm hoping that my book can be used by activists to show them that they're not by themselves. In fact, they're part of a legacy, a genealogy if you will, a lineage of people who have always put food at the center of social struggle to think about how can we ensure that everybody is food secure? I couldn't leave the book in the civil rights era. I wanted to think about how people today, so the rural Black youth that I write about in chapter four in the book, they continue this story, but they're thinking about how can we, one, reclaim the past but also make it fit today? The local foodscape of the Delta is different now, back then, the Delta's Foodscape was shaped by mostly commissary stores and a few grocery stores as well as these plantation stores. And they all worked together to create this type of food outlet or food environment for to be poor world Black communities. But today we have a prevalence of corner stores, a prevalence of liquor stores, dollar stores, and those type of stores that carry cheap and highly processed foods or even no foods. And that's the foodscape by which activists are navigating today in the Delta. And I wanted to create a type of book that could help them think about how we can use history as a way to shape our strategies? Because while I tell the food story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, there's a food story of the Alabama Civil Rights Movement, a food story of the North Carolina Civil Rights Movement. And I want to give people permission to begin to excavate those stories and think more about how it relates to the work they're doing today.
That's really helpful. I mean, you clearly have an eye toward the public to say, "What can folks who are on the ground doing the work of trying to fight for food justice pull from the past to use as strategy, as motivation, as even hope?" And I really appreciate that. Now I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about policy because I'm at a policy center and I'm interested to understand what we can learn about current conversations about federal, agricultural or food policies, given what you say?
I appreciate this question, Norbert. So, next year marks 60 years since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Federal Food Stamp bill, which created food stamps. We call SNAP today the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. What does it mean to think about food stamps 60 years later? My book provides an untold history, if you will, about the food stamp program. When many people think about federal food policies, they think about these policies as a way to ensure that people get something to eat. People need these programs to get access to groceries, get access to foods from a number of places. But historically, these food policies and ag policies were not necessarily designed to impact the public at large. And I think it's important for us to understand it as we think about how we're going to revise these programs to ensure that they're meeting the needs of the actual recipients. What we do know about food stamps is that in the past, it was designed while Lyndon B. Johnson and others argued in the 1960s that it was a part of this larger war on poverty and that it would help people get out of poverty. But food policies are not necessarily designed to get people out of poverty. It doesn't necessarily give them more actual money for them to take care of other things in their lives. Now, while it gives them some type of supplemental food assistance that then could possibly increase their income, it doesn't give them direct aid. And what I want my book to do is for us to begin to complicate how we think about ag and food policies and recognizing that while on the surface or when we read the legislation, it's designed to do X, Y, and Z, what actually happens and what we do know in the 1960s after the Federal Food Stamp program is passed, and it comes in Mississippi, people become more food insecure in Mississippi. And that's interesting to understand because people think when food stamps come to Mississippi, oh, now everybody can eat. And in fact, civil rights activists were saying, "Actually, no, we can't even eat now because you have these requirements." And that's also what we're seeing today. Activists have been organizing to shift the requirements of what it means to get SNAP or what it means to get food aid. And year after year or every five years under the Farm Bill, it gets harder and harder for people to get something to eat. But somebody's still making money from these policies and I'm hoping that my book provides at least an entry point or a window into complicating those conversations. I mean, if the goal is to feed people through food policy, then I'm hoping that we can learn this history, learn from it and as a way to revise what's going on presently to impact the future.
As you know, USDA just released its most recent estimates of food insecurity in the United States and there's been an increase.
Yeah, I saw that. Yeah.
Yeah, and the fact that we're now in the conversation around the Farm Bill and what's going to happen there. I think there's some important policy conversations that need to take place. And one thing, of course, given the origins of your book and where you're located, in addition to thinking about the policy, there are racial and societal concerns that also crop up. Thank you for exploring these issues and trying to recognize the complexity of the lives that we live. So, I appreciate your project there.
Thank you for framing it the way that you did. I'm glad you borrowed the food insecurity increasing because it's important to recognize that nationally, it's gone up. So, what does that mean for those demographics that were already disproportionately impacted by food insecurity? Thank you for bringing up that particular point.
I understand that your book is the inaugural publication of the newly launched Black Food Justice series at the University of North Carolina Press. That's wonderful. Congratulations.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
My last question for you is how do you see your book reshaping our understanding of food justice?
I've been thinking a lot about food justice, at least for the past 10 years. And in many conversations about food justice, there's been an explicit focus on thinking about race, but mostly thinking about race in the context of what we called the local food movement. So many of us, even myself, have argued before about how the local food movement is overwhelmingly White and overwhelmingly affluent and that poor people or people of color or Black people can't even get access to the movement. And while that was important, some maybe five years ago thinking about food justice, what my book shows is that the story of food justice or the development of the movement has deep roots in the arc of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. And I think that's important because when we begin to think about food justice, we tend to automatically connect it to the Environmental Justice Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. And what my book shows is that in fact, Black folks have been doing food justice since they were enslaved. They just didn't have the language to call it food justice because they were just attempting to survive. They were trying to make new worlds in a strange world they were brought to when they were enslaved because there wasn’t any knowledge. So, what my book shows or extends or what it does or what it begins to reshape, if you think about this idea of food justice, is that it shows that there's more to food justice than just an opposition to local foods or just opposition to the absence of Black people at farmer's markets and CSAs. In fact, food justice has a deep history in how Black people reimagine their worlds and how they put food at the center. And I believe that's what my book does. It reshapes our understandings of food justice, and it provides concrete examples of how food justice morphs with the times. How it looked during times of slavery versus Jim Crow versus civil rights versus current that we find ourselves in. In the sense, what I'm attempting to do is I'm showing how it connects food justice connect to civil rights, but also, I'm showing more largely how the food justice movement, in many ways, African Americans provide the blueprint for understanding how we can achieve food justice in our nation and around the world today.
Bio
Dr. Bobby J. Smith II is an interdisciplinary scholar of the African American agricultural and food experience. Trained as a sociologist, with a background in agricultural economics, Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science. He is the author of Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, 2023), the inaugural book of the newly launched Black Food Justice Series at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press. Dr. Smith earned a B.S. degree (summa cum laude) in Agriculture, with a focus on Agricultural Economics, from Prairie View A&M University in 2011. He earned a M.S. degree in Agricultural and Applied Economics in 2013 and a Ph.D. in Development Sociology in 2018 from Cornell University. Most recently, Dr. Smith has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among others.
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In August of 2023, the Food and Drug Administration issued something known as a direct final rule, disregarded trans fats in the food supply. Consumers won't notice changes as the rule just finalizes FDA's 2015 ruling that partially hydrogenated oils - trans fats - no longer had "GRAS status." GRAS stands for generally regarded as safe. We cover this issue today because this trans fat ban was the product of lots of work by a key group of scientists, the advocacy community, and others. The anatomy of this process can teach us a lot about harnessing scientific discovery for social and policy change. At the center of all this is today's guest, Dr. Walter Willett. Willett is one of the world's leading nutrition researchers. He is professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and for many years served as chair of its Department of Nutrition. He's published extensively, been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and it turns out, is the world's most cited nutrition researcher.
Interview Summary
There are so many things I could talk to you about because you do work in such an array of really important areas and have just made contribution after contribution for years. But let's talk about the trans fat because you were there at the very beginning, and it ended up with a profound public policy ruling that has major implications for the health of the country. I'd like to talk about how this all occurred. So, tell us, if you would, what are trans fats, how present were they in the food supply over the years, and what early discoveries did you and others make that led you to be concerned?
Yes, this is a story from which I've learned a lot, and hopefully others might as well. Trans fats are produced by the process called partial hydrogenation. This takes liquid vegetable oils, like soybean oils, corn oil, canola oil, and subjects them to a process with high heat and bubbling hydrogen through the oil. What this is doing is taking essential molecules, essential fatty acids like the omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids and twisting their shapes just subtly, and this turns them into a solid fat instead of a liquid fat. And, of course, the food industry likes this because our culture, the Northern European eating culture, emphasizes solid fats like butter and lard. Industry really didn't know what to do with all the liquid oil that they were able to produce by another process that was discovered back in the late 1800s. The partial hydrogenation process was actually developed in about 1908, and someone actually got a Nobel Prize for that. It wasn't used widely in the food industry till the 1930s and 1940s when it was upscaled because it was cheaper, for multiple reasons, to partially hydrogenate oils and turn them into solid fats like Cricso and margarines. I got worried about this, actually, back in the 1970s, when other scientists were discovering that these essential fatty acids are important for many biological processes, clotting, arrhythmias, inflammation, and counteracting inflammation. I realized while studying food science at that time that there was nobody really keeping an eye on this. That there were these synthetic fatty acids in massive amounts in our food supplies. Margarines, vegetable shortenings were up to 30% and 40% made of trans fatty acids. And that may me concerned that this could have a big downside. So, back in 1980, with the help of some people at the Department of Agriculture developing a database for trans fats in foods, we began collecting data on trans fat intake in our large cohort studies. And about 20 years later, we saw that trans fat intake was related to risk of heart disease. We published that in 1993. That got us started on the pathway to getting them out of our food supply.
Let's talk about how present they were in the food supply. You mentioned some things like margarine and Crisco, but these fats were in a lot of different products, weren't they?
Yes, they were almost everywhere. You could hardly pick up a product that had a nutrition facts label that didn't say partially hydrogenated fat on it. It was really in virtually everything that was industrially made in our food system.
Just because they could produce them at low cost? Or did they have other properties that were desirable from the industry's point of view?
These trans fats had multiple characteristics. One, they could be solid. And again, because they mimicked butter and lard, it fit into lots of foods. Second, they had very long shelf life. Third, you could heat them up and use them for deep frying, and they could sit there in fryolators for days and not be changed. So, this was all good for the food system. It wanted really long shelf life and started with cheap ingredients.
So, after those initial findings that raised red flags, what kind of research did you do subsequently and at what level of proof did you feel policy change might be warranted?
Within our own group, we continued to follow our participants. These are close to 100,000 women in the Nurses' Health Study, and also another 50,000 in the health professionals follow up study. We confirmed our initial findings and then found that trans fats were related to risk of many other conditions, from diabetes to infertility. And simultaneous with our work in the 1990s, some of our colleagues in the Netherlands were doing what we called controlled feeding studies. These studies take a few dozen people and feed them high trans fat or low trans fat for a few weeks and watch what happens to risk factors like cholesterol levels and triglyceride levels. And they found that trans fats had uniquely adverse consequences. They raised the bad cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and reduced the good cholesterol, HDL cholesterol. So, they had unique adverse biological effects. It was really that combination of that short-term kind of study and the long-term epidemiologic studies we were doing that made a compelling case that trans fats were the cause of cardiovascular disease.
So, a line of considerable work took place over a number of years, and then got to that point where you felt something needed to be done. And the fact that you did that science and that you were worried about these trans fats in the first place is impressive because you were really onto something important. But what happened after you did the series of studies? What steps occurred and who were the key actors that finally led to policy change occurring?
Well, as we expected, there was pushback from the industry about this because they were so invested in trans fat. And I was actually disappointed that a lot of our colleagues in the American Heart Association and others pushed back as well. They didn't want to distract from saturated fat. But, when studies were reproduced, it was really undeniable that there was a problem. But, if the studies had just been put on a shelf and sitting there, probably nothing would've happened. And it was really important that we partnered with advocacy groups, particularly Mike Jacobson, Margo Wootan at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, because they had a readership and audience that we didn't have. And they also were more familiar with the workings of the Food and Drug Administration and government in general. But I also was told somewhere around that time that women, who are the main food purchases, pay most attention to a lot of the women's journals, Family Circle, those kinds of journals. And actually, for good reasons. Their journalists are very good. So, I've talked to those journalists every opportunity. And it turned out it was really important to have some public awareness about this problem. If it was just good science and things worked as they should have, the FDA would've looked at the evidence and just ruled out trans fat from our food supply early on, but they didn't. It really took major concerted effort by the combination of the scientific community and the advocacy group.
Did you bump into conflict of interest problems with other scientists who were receiving funding from the industry and you know them talking to the press or speaking at conferences or things like that?
Well, there's plenty of conflicts of interest within the nutrition community, but actually, I don't think that was so much of an problem here. In some ways, there was a conflict of sort of personal commitment to entirely focusing on saturated fat and not wanting to see any distraction. I don't think a conflict of interest in the economic monetary sense.
Walter, I remember back when this discussion was occurring and industry was fighting back. They made claims that food prices would go up, that the quality of foods would go down, that it would be a real hit to their business because consumers wouldn't like products without the trans fats. What became of all those arguments?
It's interesting and it's important to keep in mind that the industry is not monolithic. And I have to credit Unilever, actually, with paying attention to the scientific evidence, which was really rejected here. Interestingly, at that time, all the major margarine manufacturers were owned by the tobacco industry. And you can imagine that those CEOs were not getting out of their bed in the morning and saying, well, what can I do to make Americans healthier? No, they were not interested in health. But Unilever was a food company and it was invested in staying as a food company for the continuing future. And they did realize that this was a problem, and they invested a lot of money to re-engineer their products, re-engineer their production of margarine and shortening. And they did take trans fat out of their products. They obviously did a lot of taste testing to make sure they were acceptable. And once they did that, the industry could no longer say that it's impossible to do it. It's sort of like the automobile industry when Detroit said, you just can't build low pollution cars, but then the Japanese did it and then they could no longer deny it.
Boy, it's such an interesting story that occurred. With Unilever getting involved as they did. That must have been a very positive push forward. They're second biggest food company in the world.
That was really helpful. And again, I think it was because they had a lot of scientists, both nutritionists and food chemists. I was told they had about 800 such employees at that time. They could see, if you looked at the evidence honestly, this was a serious issue. One of their chief scientists later told me that it was actually one of our editorials in the American Journal of Public Health where we estimated that there would be about 80,000 premature deaths per year due to trans fat. And once they saw that, they said, we can't have Willett going around saying there's going to be 80,000 premature deaths, and they realized they had to do something. It's interesting, you write an editorial, you don't know who's going to read it, but sometimes it hits one person who can really make a difference.
It is nice to know that people read things like that once in a while. Let's go to where you were at that point. You produced a lot of science. You were communicating this to professional audiences, but also to the general public with interviews and magazines and things like that. And the advocacy community, especially the Center for Science in the Public Interest, got activated. What happened then?
Well, a couple things happened. One is that they brought up and proposed labeling trans fat on the nutrition facts label and submitted that to the FDA. The FDA sat on it. There was, of course, lots of backdoor action by the American food industry that did not want to change what they were doing. And despite some prodding by CSPI over the years, that sat there for about 10 years almost. Ironically, there was a faculty member at Harvard Chan School of Public Health at that time who had seen a display we had done on trans fat. We built a big tower out of blocks of trans fat and had a little poster there talking about it. He went to Washington and became a senior person at the Office for Management and Budget. And Mike Jacobson went to go visit him with a petition to label trans fat, and our faculty person said, I know about trans fat because Willnett had that display in our cafeteria. He wrote a letter to the FDA that was quite unprecedented, basically saying that either put trans fat on the food label or tell us why not. Which is a quite strong letter. And then the wheels started turning, and there was delay and delay for a pushback on the food industry. But by 2008, trans fat actually did get on the food label. And that had a very major impact, because once it had to be on the label, the food industry took it out. They sort of knew it was coming because they didn't want to admit it publicly. But I think they understood for quite a while that they were going to have to get it out, but that was really the turning point. All of a sudden, almost all the food products had zero on the trans fat line there.
Let's talk about the public health impact of this. You mentioned 80,000 or some deaths occurring each year attributable to consumption of trans fat. Can we conclude from that that we're saving that many lives now with trans fat out of the food supply? And does that mean 80,000 lives year after year after year?
It's hard to know exactly and of course, so many things are going on at the same time. And the trans fat didn't go down abruptly because Unilever was, even in the American market, a pretty major producer, starting by the mid 1990s, trans fat intake actually did start to go down. And other things are going on, obviously obesity epidemic counterbalancing a lot of positive things that were happening. But, there were some economists looking at communities that adopted trans fat bans early on versus those that did not, and they could show there was a divergence in heart attacks and hospitalizations for heart disease. So it's hard to pin an exact number on it, again, because all these things happen at the same time. But it's quite clear that we would be having quite a bit more heart disease if trans fat had not been eliminated. I would also look back to another important step in the process because even though we got trans fat on the food label, and the products that had it quite quickly became, almost all of them, zero trans fat, but that didn't deal with a restaurant industry, which was also a very big source of trans fat. And there it took community activists to make this happen. There was a small community in Northern California that was really the first community that banned trans fat in restaurants, and a few other places did. But then Mayor Bloomberg of New York, there's another backstory why he got interested in this. But it's one of these things, you put out information and you don't know who's going to read it, and someone had read some of our work and to convince his health department and Bloomberg himself that trans fats had to go, and New York banned trans fats. And then some other communities, Massachusetts and elsewhere in the food industry, the restaurant industry realized they couldn't have a patchwork distribution system. And so that was a tipping point that trans fat was eliminated in the food service industry long before the FDA finally made the ruling. In fact, by the time the FDA made the ruling about trans fat and pressure hydrogenated fat, it was almost gone.
To go back and look at the history of this, it's a relatively small number of key people taking the right actions at the right time that ultimately led to change. And thank goodness for those people like you and Mike Jacobson, Margo Wootan, and Mayor Bloomberg, and a few other people in political circles that took the bull by the horns and really got something done. Very impressive. As you look back on this, what lessons did you learn that you think might be helpful for future policy changes?
I think there are a number of lessons. I'd like to think, first of all, that solid good science is really important. Without that, we couldn't have a hard time making changes that we need to do. But that's usually not going to be enough. It's really important to work with advocacy groups like CSPI. It's important, sometimes, to work with journalists and provide good information, education. But it's hard to know exactly which path is going to be successful. One thing is quite clear, in this country, in many areas, change does not happen from the top. It's not enough just to have good science. And oftentimes, changes happen from the bottom up at the local level, the state level, and the national government may be the last place where action occurs.
So what changes in the food supply do you feel would be most pressing right now?
We certainly have a lot of problems in our food supply. If you look around, most people are consuming diets and beverages that are quite unhealthy. And there are so many issues, I think, still and we've worked on this issue is a sugar sweetened beverage issue, and we've had some real progress in that area, but still, there's a huge way to go to reduce sugar sweetened beverages. But that's part of a bigger problem in terms of what we're consuming. And I would call that carbohydrate quality, that about half of our calories come from carbohydrates. In about 80% of that half, in other words, about 40%, of all the calories we consume are refined starch, sugar, and potatoes which have adverse metabolic effects, lead to weight gain, lead to diabetes, lead to cardiovascular disease. So that's a huge area that we need to work on.
You've talked, so far, with the trans fat and, you know, and with other things in the food supply like salt, these are things that you'd be taking out of the food. That all makes good sense. What about putting things in? Talk about things that might support the microbiome, more fiber, or things that might support brain health and things like that, so what are your feeling about those things?
You're right, our problems are both what's there in quantities that are unhealthy and also what's missing. Inadequate fiber intake is actually part of the carbohydrate problem. Clearly, we should be consuming many more whole grains compared to the amount of refined grains that we consume. And, of course, we get some fiber from fruits and vegetables. So I think, in addition to this huge amount of unhealthy carbohydrates and inadequate amount of whole grains, we do need to be consuming more fruits and vegetables. And then on the sort of protein source side, we're clearly consuming too much red meat and replacing that with plant protein sources like nuts, legumes, and soy products would be really important for direct human health. But also, that's an area where the environmental and climate change issues are extremely pressing and shifting from a more animal-centric diet to more plant-centric diet would have enormous benefits for climate change as well as direct effects for human health.
Bio
Walter C. Willett, M.D., Dr. P.H., is Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Willett studied food science at Michigan State University, and graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School before obtaining a Masters and Doctorate in Public Health from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Willett has focused much of his work over the last 40 years on the development and evaluation of methods, using both questionnaire and biochemical approaches, to study the effects of diet on the occurrence of major diseases. He has applied these methods starting in 1980 in the Nurses' Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Together, these cohorts that include nearly 300,000 men and women with repeated dietary assessments, are providing the most detailed information on the long-term health consequences of food choices. Dr. Willett has published over 2,000 original research papers and reviews, primarily on lifestyle risk factors for heart disease, cancer, and other conditions and has written the textbook, Nutritional Epidemiology, published by Oxford University Press, now in its third edition. He also has written four books for the general public. Dr. Willett is the most cited nutritionist internationally. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of many national and international awards for his research.
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White Oak Pastures is a sixth generation, 156-year-old family farm in Bluffton, Georgia. It's also the home of Rancher Will Harris who runs an expansive, zero waste production system with the animals he pasture raises and butchers on the farm. White Oak Pastures produces grass fed beef, lamb, goat, and Heritage pork, and pastured turkeys, chicken, duck, geese, and more. Will is a vocal and passionate champion of radically traditional farming as the path to regenerative land management, humane animal husbandry, and revitalizing rural communities. This is the second time we've spoken with Will Harris. The first time came right on the heels of a really interesting national meeting held in Tennessee on regenerative farming, where I became very impressed with Will and the work he's doing. He was kind enough to join us for a podcast at that time. Our discussion today happens to coincide with the release of a book that Will has written entitled, "A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food.”
Interview Summary
I really would love to dive into the meaning behind the title of your book, and what you wrote about. But let me ask you a few lead-in questions. Many years ago, you made a profound change in the way you approached ranching and farming. What convinced you back then that this kind of change was necessary? And tell us what you did if you would.
My dad ran the farm before me. He was born in 1920, took over the farm post World War II, 1945. He was the generation that really industrialized, commoditized, and centralized the farm. It went from being the really typical 19th century farm under my great-grandfather and grandfather, to being a monocultural cattle operation. My dad was very, very good at it, a great cattleman. He ran the farm profitably. And all I ever wanted to do was come back and run the farm as a monocultural industrial cattle operation. I just loved it. I went to University of Georgia in 1972 and majored in animal science with the intention of coming back, and I did. And I loved it. You know, we weren't wealthy people, but we made money every year. We paid taxes every single year. And I was happy for a long time. But, in the mid-nineties, the excesses of that industrial monocultural model, became displeasing to me. When it started, it happened fairly quickly, and I decided to change. I did not have a goal to move towards, I just knew what I wanted to move away from. I started moving away from it almost 30 years ago, and I've been moving away from it ever since.
I'd love to follow up on one thing that you mentioned, and it's the generational nature of kind of farming overall, and your farm. Several years ago, I did a tour of farms in Eastern North Carolina, and I was really impressed with how important the family aspect of that was. Could you just tell us a little bit about that? What does that mean to you and six generations? That's really impressive.
The family aspect of it is a blessing and a curse, but it's been a blessing for us. This is just the way it is. My dad was an only child, and I am an only child. So, the passing down of the asset, the farm, farmland was very easy for us. I'm reminded that the old European way of all the assets going to the eldest son was certainly not fair, but I think that went a long way towards ensuring that the asset was passed down and kept intact, as opposed to dividing it up equally among the two, three, four, six, seven siblings. I have three daughters, two of which have come back to the farm. And I will leave the farm to those two daughters. So, our farm is unusual. And it's five, maybe six generations old, but it too will cease to be at some point. That's the way it is. There are other people that want to start farming, that need the opportunity. So this, it's just a good healthy, natural business system.
You referred to the farm as an asset, but I have a feeling it's more than that. I mean you could be passing down to subsequent generations a service station, or a convenience store, or a dry cleaner or something like that. But I have a feeling that the fact that you're passing along something that is tied to the land, it just has so much more meaning. Tell me if I'm wrong.
No, you're exactly right. But I put a finer point on it. There are not many non-depreciating assets. Land is a non-depreciating asset. I guess gyms are a non-depreciating asset, probably art. There just aren't many assets that don't have a finite life for them. But land is one of them. It's perpetual. And I would argue that the herds also are perpetual. Certainly, the individual animal in the herd has an expected lifespan, but the herd itself is perpetual. My cattle herd literally goes back genetically to the cattle my great-grandfather brought here 150 years ago. So, when you take that perspective, it turns the asset that you inherit or build up or however that goes, it turns it into something very, very special. And I think it should be treated that way.
So, let's get back to the farm itself. What have some of the effects been on your land, of the practices that you use on the environment, and also on the food you raise? How do you work to achieve zero waste production? And what do you mean by that?
Well, the impact on the land has been incredible. When I started changing the way I farm, which means principally giving up tillage, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and grazing my animals differently and having a broad spectrum of species of animals on the farm, it changed dramatically. My land went from a half a percent organic model - point five, one half of one percent - to five percent. A 10X increase, okay? It's incredible. And just to talk about the water holding capacity, I don't want to go too far down that hole, but 1% organic matter generally holds 27,000 gallons of water per acre. So, when you go from a half percent to 5%, a 10x increase, you can see what that does to the water holding capacity. The change is just as dramatic in terms of microbial life, and other aspects of soil productivity. So, it is incredible what it does. As far as the animals go, I had a monoculture of cattle, but I had a lot of them. And I always believed that our animal welfare was just great. I mean, I thought it was fine until I had my eyes opened and I realized that keeping them well fed, watered, in comfortable temperature range, is not good for the welfare. I thought it was, but it's not. It's also incumbent upon the herdsman to give the animals the opportunity to express instinctive behavior. Cattle were born to roam and graze, not stand in a pen and eat out of a trough. Chickens were born to scratch and pick. Hogs were born to root and wallow. And in the industrial model, those species don't get to do that. So, that's a beautiful thing to me. And then the environment, you know, I really believe that we're sequestering a lot of carbon. You mentioned zero waste. And when I say zero waste, I don't want people to think that there's never any plastic that's hauled off from here. Certainly, there is. But we slaughter our animals here on the farm, we've got a pretty big slaughter plant for red meat and poultry for private farm abattoir. And it generates about seven tons a day of packing plant waste. That's the term USDA uses. We compost that and make just wonderful compost that we reapply to the land. And it's just, it's just a beautiful thing.
That is beautiful. So, let's talk about the zero-waste concept. When people hear that, I think some people think that it means you don't waste any parts of the animal when it's being turned into food for human consumption. But you're talking about more than that. And you mentioned the carbon sequestration in the soil. Can you explain what that means and how that fits into the zero-waste idea?
I will but let me also address the fact that it does mean what you said. It does mean using all the animals. We render the fat into the lard and tallow, which we sell or make soap out of. The hides go to make raw hide pet chews, or I send it away to be turned into leather. We have a shop where we make leather goods. I can go on and on about the things we do to not waste. We grind the bones that are not marketable as soup bones. We grind them and apply them to the land as well as a source of calcium and phosphate. So, zero waste takes a lot of different ramifications to achieve that. And as for the carbon, you know, the carbon in our soil, the organic amount I mentioned earlier? Having increased this so dramatically is yet another way of not emitting. A company called Quantis, an environmental engineering company, did a lifecycle assessment on our farm several years ago. It's called LCA. And it's actually on my website, https://whiteoakpastures.com. And it shows that we sequester carbon. It's 3.5 pounds of carbon to sequestered soil for every pound that we put up. So, it's certainly doing positive things, we believe, for the environment.
That's so important, because otherwise that carbon would be up there in the atmosphere, creating a lot of damage that people know about. So, the fact that you're drawing it down, and sequestering it in the soil is doing a really good turn for our environment overall. Tet me say also, I love your website, https://whiteoakpastures.com, because it tells the story of what you do, it provides some history and resources about the farm, but also you have a lot of really pretty amazing products that you sell. And so, it's nice to know that these things are available to people who might be interested in buying the products for your farm.
It is so interesting and frustrating to me that a certain brand of environmentalist has identified cattle as being the primary culprit in climate change. And of course, it's simply not true. It is not fair to brand cattle with that claim, that, you know. If you want to blame the cattle feeding industry, confinement feeding industry with that, then I support it. But the way we raise cattle not only does it not contribute negatively, but it’s also part of the cure. And that's, it's just so unfair.
Let's think about the radical change you made in the family's farming practices. Tell me how risky this was? I mean, how risky was it to you in terms of your reputation, your place in the community with other people that may have been continuing to use all kinds of industrial farming and ranching methods, and financially, how risky was it?
That's a great question. And when I give the answer, I certainly don't sound very smart. Because there was a lot of naivety in the decision I made. I really did not understand how much risk I was taking on. I should have, in retrospect. I was just a little reckless. But I always ran the farm, and I'd always made money. I was going to change the way I run the farm, and I assumed it would continue to make money, but it didn't. I was adding value to the product I was producing, grass fed beef, that I was not able to extract from the market at that time. Partially because I didn't have processing available, and partly because grass fed beef had not come into its being in the consumer community. So, we had some pretty tough times, but we made it through it. And my timing going in the grass-fed business in that mid-nineties to early two thousands was so, so lucky. And I really, really do mean lucky. Today, I don't think we would've made it. There's too much imported grass-fed beef. That is labeled as "Product of the USA." The market has tightened and tougher because of that. We made it then, but I don't think we would make it today.
What does that say for farmers today who might be considering making the kind of changes that you made many years ago?
Well, I don't like reporting this, but I've gone from really being a recruiter urging people to embrace this kind of agriculture to really warning people, "Be careful." I don't recommend people not do it, but I really do focus on them being careful. And we sat up a 501 C3 called Center for Agricultural Resilience to help people learn the things that we've learned, so that they won't make a mistake. I really want people to farm this way. And my goal is not to grow White Oak Pastures. White Oak Pastures is as big as I ever wanted it to be. I never really intended it to be as big as it is. Growth is not important to me and my family. We've talked about it, and we're in agreement on that. But I do want to see regenerative food production grow. The way we farm is very cyclical, as opposed to the industrial food market, which is very linear. The food product system is very linear. And linear systems scale up really well. Cyclical systems, I think they kind of have a maximum level at which they perform well. And I think we're at it. So, my goal is not to grow White Oak Pastures bigger and bigger. Again, as a family, we've talked about it and decided not to. We don't want a business so big that we've got to hire a CEO to run it for us. We sell $25 million worth of products a year. And that's enough. It's bigger than we intended it to be.
Given that you said that it's not risk free to make this kind of change, and that people need to go into it with their eyes open, it seems to me, that there's a lot more attention now and awareness of regenerative agriculture. People in the general population know about it much more than they did even just a few years ago. And you have, you know, movies about it and television shows, and you have big institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation investing in it. I see that as a positive sign. I don't know if you do as well. But are there other things that can be done to create more inducements to farmers to make this change? Are there policies, for example, that might be put in place that would be helpful?
Well, and that is opposed to the multinational food corporations. There re only a handful of them, that are feeding the entire planet. And they're very linear, and there are many, many, many unintended consequences to their production system. It's really adverse to the environment, the land, the water, the atmosphere, the animals, and rural America. I can go on that on.
So, let's dive into that just a little bit. What can consumers do? Where do they look for their food? What do they look for? Where can they buy things? What can they do to help?
The things you said are certainly great positive signs. They're very, very, very good. But unfortunately, big food has focused on this market. And engaged in very, very talented, skillful greenwashing that tricks the public. And that's the impediment and that's the problem. I just don't know how it's going to come out. I used to believe that I was an early innovator in this new way of producing food that was better for the land, and rural America and the environment, and the animals. I was happy about it, very satisfied in it. And I still hope that's the case. But new, young, or old, a person who is moving from industrial commodity agriculture into what we do today, has a harder go of it than I had 20 years ago, because of greenwashing. From the consumer perspective, it's a lot better today. There are a lot more people talking about it, and a lot more general information out there among the public. But the multinational corporations that are tricking people, they're just very successful. When I called my book "Return to Giving a Damn," that was what I was referring to. That the consumer has got to educate themselves and see where their food actually comes from.
There are more opportunities to do that, I know. Where I live in North Carolina, there are a number of butcher shops around. And some of them in particular make it very clear that they're sourcing everything from local farms, and they talk about how the animals are raised, and they're tied into the kind of thing that you're talking about. So, it's nice that there are more such opportunities out there. And butcher shops seem to be one good place to go if you're a person who consumes meat.
That's a good question. And I think that the more locally you can shop, the better. We sell food online, and we ship to 48 states. And I don't want to. Now I appreciate everybody that's been buying from us. I'm grateful for it. Thank you. But I really want to sell my products to people in my geography. And I want people in the Pacific Northwest and the New England, and the other areas of the country to have producers, that they support, that are local to them, local food systems. I'm happy to sell anybody anywhere, but I'd really rather to help somebody get started. I will just say that.
It's nice that you offer your foods for sale online, because that does give people the opportunity to buy some of the things that you raise, and be connected with the story of the food that you've told us all about.
That is very pleasing to hear.
Say just a little bit more about greenwashing. How does it take place, and how can consumers know that it's occurring?
The way for consumers to avoid greenwashing, is also to know as much as you can about who you're buying your food from.
I hope the kind of education that you're doing, things like joining us, and writing your book will alert consumers to these kind of practices, and hopefully there will then be demand on legislators, change the way they write the laws to prevent this kind of stuff. But boy, it takes time, doesn't it?
Greenwashing is messaging. Big multinational food companies and Ag companies hire brilliant marketers to convey the message they want to convey to consumers about how the food is produced. And I mean, it can be as simple as industrial milk having these beautiful barns and meadows, and cows on the carton too, some really technical things that are done. But it allows industrial food to be sold under the guise of being very green and humane. Big multinational food companies can import grass fed beef from 20 countries. Uruguay, New Zealand, Australia, being the three biggest or almost prominent. And sell it as American grass-fed beef. Literally and legally label it "American grass-fed beef." If the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered in one of those other countries, it can be brought into this country and legally labeled by USDA, "Product of the USA." And that is the epitome of greenwashing, and it's so very wrong. But it is allowed if any value was added here. And that changed from when I first started selling grass fed beef in the early 2000's. That's not the way that rule read, the rule changed, and this was not an accident.
So, let me ask a final question then regarding that. Are you optimistic? If you look at the current generation of young people, do they care more about these things than what used to be the case? And do you think that leads to some optimism about what might occur in the future?
Well, it does, and there's so much money behind it. I think if the food production system in this country changes, it won't be changed by Big Ag, it won't be changed by the Department of Agriculture, it won't be changed by land grant universities. It'll be changed by consumers, and what they demand.
You know, it's so nice to hear that from you. And consistent with my own experience, you know, in the classroom, you know, I've been teaching people for many years. The most recent generations of young people seem very motivated around these issues, and informed and passionate. And I see that as a very positive sign for the future. So, I'm glad your opinion on this and mine converge. And there's reason I think to be hopeful for the future. So, Will listen. It was wonderful speaking to you, and the first time we did a podcast. And equally wonderful today. So I'm really grateful you could join us. And good luck with your work. And it's clearly inspired.
There is no doubt there's more enthusiasm and optimism among young people. In fact, we have an intern program. We only take six per quarter four times a year. And we get 20 something applications for the six openings every quarter. And it's incredible. And we don't push it, we don't advertise it, because I just can't have any more than that. But the number of young, smart, enthusiastic people that come through here, most of them do not come from agricultural backgrounds, is very, very heartening. That part is just great. So, many of our young people that came through here, have gone on to do really, really good things in other places. I'm very proud of them.
Bio
Will Harris is a fourth-generation cattleman, who tends the same land that his great-grandfather settled in 1866. Born and raised at White Oak Pastures, Will left home to attend the University of Georgia's School of Agriculture, where he was trained in the industrial farming methods that had taken hold after World War II. Will graduated in 1976 and returned to Bluffton where he and his father continued to raise cattle using pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics. They also fed their herd a high-carbohydrate diet of corn and soy.
These tools did a fantastic job of taking the cost out of the system, but in the mid-1990s Will became disenchanted with the excesses of these industrialized methods. They had created a monoculture for their cattle, and, as Will says, "nature abhors a monoculture." In 1995, Will made the audacious decision to return to the farming methods his great-grandfather had used 130 years before.
Since Will has successfully implemented these changes, he has been recognized all over the world as a leader in humane animal husbandry and environmental sustainability. Will is the immediate past President of the Board of Directors of Georgia Organics. He is the Beef Director of the American Grassfed Association and was selected 2011 Business Person of the year for Georgia by the Small Business Administration.
Will lives in his family home on the property with his wife Yvonne. He is the proud father of three daughters, Jessi, Jenni, and Jodi. His favorite place in the world to be is out in pastures, where he likes to have a big coffee at sunrise and a 750ml glass of wine at sunset. -
As the parent of a 12-year-old child, I know that raising a child is one of the most profound and rewarding experiences of a person's life. It is also shockingly expensive. The high cost of child rearing is particularly difficult for families with limited resources. To help us think through this issue, it is my great pleasure to welcome a colleague here at Duke: Dr. Christina Gibson-Davis, Professor of Public Policy. Christina studies economic inequality, and particularly how it affects families with children.
Interview Summary
So, let's do a bit of level setting. We often hear words like poverty and wellbeing. For our conversation today, what is poverty in the US and what do we mean by wellbeing?
In the US we have a definition of poverty that relies on a certain threshold. Every year the US government publishes a set of thresholds for families that say - if you are below this threshold, then you are poor. If you're above this threshold, then you're not poor. The thresholds are actually based on data from 1963, when the federal government decided it really needed a way to count the number of poor people in this country. Prior to 1963, we really didn't have any way to do that. They looked at how much money people spent on food, and from that number, they derived these poverty thresholds. In 2022, the poverty threshold for a family of four, just to give your listeners some idea, was about $22,000. This means that if you earned $21,999, you were considered poor. But if you earned $22,001, you weren't considered poor. That's what I mean about the threshold and about falling either above or below that threshold in order to determine whether or not you're poor.
Thank you, Christina, that's really helpful. It is interesting that the measure of poverty really is centering on food, or at least traditionally has. We’ll get back to that in a moment. I want to go back to the question of wellbeing. Could you tell our listeners what you're talking about when you talk about wellbeing?
When we talk about wellbeing, we mean things like how healthy kids are, or how they get along with peers, or how they do in school. Basically, it's the way we measure how kids are functioning and whether they're functioning to the best of their ability.
It sounds like it's a broad notion that represents all the ways a child is a child, how they move in this world.
That's exactly right. It's going to cover a whole bunch of different areas. Everything from health and education to social relationships, to behavior, to delinquency, to how far they get in school. All of that goes into our definition of wellbeing.
Great. Thank you for that. I want to now focus a little bit more on children themselves. What does childhood poverty look like in the US?
We can have a technical definition of poverty, which is what I alluded to before, but really, that technical definition I don't think paints a very illustrative portrait of what it looks like to be poor in the US. To be poor in the US as a kid means you're growing up in an environment with very low levels of economic resources. You're probably growing up in a household where you're not sure if those economic resources are going to be enough for your family to maintain their home or pay their bills or get enough food. It's a very sort of unstable situation for kids because they may be worried that their parents just don't have enough money. It also sort of affects the kids' outlooks. We know that poor kids tend to have sort of lower aspirations or hopes for the future. Not that they're not hopeful, but they sort of also know that some of the things that they see may be depicted on TV that are open to other kids may not be an option for them; because they simply don't see a path between where they are and how they're going to get there.
That is actually pretty sobering. I'd like for you to explain something about households with children, and I noticed that a lot of our conversation is going to not focus on an individual child but about children in household context. So, how does poverty look different for households with children than households without children? Is there a difference?
Yes, there's a difference in poverty rates. One of the things that distinguishes poverty in the United States relative to poverty in other Western or developed countries is that we have very, very high rates of child poverty. And one of the biggest risk factors, in fact, for being poor in the United States is being a kid. Kids tend to have higher poverty rates than other groups. Why is that? Well, obviously kids aren't out making money. They're relying on their parents for their financial wellbeing. But it really has to do with the public policy choices that we've made. Your listeners have probably heard of Social Security and Medicaid, and those are two huge programs that make huge differences in the lives of say, people over the age of 65. We really don't have those kinds of corollaries for kids who are poor. And so, when you look at our policy priorities over the past, say half century, they've really been oriented more towards elderly people rather than kids. That's just a policy choice that we have made.
Thank you for sharing that. I know in some of the work that you've done, you've also looked at these issues through an equity lens. Can you tell us a little bit more about the wealth inequalities of households with children. And how does that work shape how we should look at child wellbeing?
We've been talking up until this point primarily about income, which for most people is the money that they earn through their job. We think about income as the money that flows into your house. There's also this really important concept, which is called wealth. Wealth is a household's assets minus its debts. So, for most households, their primary asset is their house. And then they might have debts because they owe money on their house, or they have medical loans or education loans or things like that. So, wealth in the US is distributed far more unequally than income. In particular, the racial gaps in wealth are staggering. So, in the US, for every dollar of wealth that is held by a white family with children, a black family has less than 1 cent. Again, that's a $1 to less than 1 cent ratio. When you have those kinds of inequities, it's really hard for some families to make a difference in the lives of their kids. We know that wealth really helps, for example, for kids to go to college or to make a successful transition to young adulthood. And when we have these kinds of race-based inequities, it really hampers some of these kids from realizing their full potential.
I know we have a number of colleagues like Sandy Darity who work on this racial wealth gap. So, this is a critical topic that has influence on how we need to think about these issues. And that's going to connect a topic that I have worked on, and that's a great interest of our center. It's the topic of food insecurity. Christina, can you help connect childhood poverty to food insecurity?
Food insecurity, as many of your listeners may know, is the ability to have enough food for a healthy, active lifestyle. Not surprisingly, being poor puts you at increased risk of being food insecure. It's probably the predominant risk factor for being food insecure. The reason we care about that is because we know that food insecurity has all kinds of detrimental consequences for children. So, we were talking earlier about wellbeing covering a wide range of outcomes. Food insecurity really diminishes kids' wellbeing in many of those areas that we were talking about. Kids who are food insecure are less healthy, they do less well in school, they may have more behavior problems. So, food insecurity is really something that can undermine the life chances of children.
I'm interested in now turning our focus to this issue of policy. We're at a policy school and I would like for you to talk a bit about what our current policies are for addressing food insecurity.
For children, there are a number of food programs in the US. I would say the three most relevant ones for children are SNAP or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits, and WIC, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women and Children. And then there is a free and reduced lunch program. Those programs together really try to address food insufficiency among children. The evidence suggests that they work pretty well. None of them by themselves are going to reduce all food insecurity among kids, but they definitely lessen the levels of food insecurity that kids experience.
There was an article in the "New York Times" about a year ago, the Fall of 2022, and it talked about readjustments to the measure of poverty, and they followed the family out of West Virginia. One of the things they did was they looked at the income that this family received, and it showed that 25% of the total, if you will, resources that came into this family were food-based programs, WIC, SNAP, and School Lunch Program. So, it's an important part of how families with limited resources are able to meet some of their needs. I'm appreciative of you sharing that.
I think it's absolutely vital, particularly when you think about families that may be living in places with really high rents. There's been a lot of talk lately about how the cost of housing has gone up, and really these sources of food assistance that they get from the government is just absolutely critical to helping them meet the basic needs of their families. So absolutely, these food assistance programs are just a linchpin of how these families survive.
It's interesting now that we're in this moment of debating the Farm Bill, which is the federal program that supports SNAP, how it's important for us to keep in mind that beneficiary of the SNAP program are children and children whose wellbeing can be affected by a program like this. I'm grateful for this conversation. Now, how effective are these policies at reducing food insecurity and addressing child wellbeing?
These programs work fairly well. They're not, I would say, large enough or convey enough resources to eradicate levels of food insecurity. I think it's also important for your listeners to know that there is no such thing as a federal food policy. So, we let states set the limits, for example, as to how much they're going to spend on SNAP. This leads to large variations in like the SNAP limits. So, for example, if you live in New York, you get about $100 more in SNAP benefits than if you live in Oklahoma. So, what does this mean? It means that these programs are going to be more effective in some states than in others, simply because of the amount of resources that people may get based on where they live.
As we wrap up, I wonder if you have any other points of consideration about policy and how policies that we currently have can actually help us address child wellbeing more effectively.
One of the other things that distinguishes the US food policy landscape, if you will, is we also have a relatively large private sector. So, people may be familiar with food banks or other places where they distribute food. And, you know, that's sort of the best and the worst that America has to offer, right? The best is that charitable organizations recognize the importance of providing food for people. And these organizations are very effective at providing meals and groceries, and it's a really important source for these families. But I say it's also the worst because there's a giant need for these private sector places. And because the provision of these private sector food goods can vary depending on where you live or how much money the nonprofit organization has, it can be a very variable source of support for food. So, in some ways, our food policy landscape is kind of a crapshoot, if you will. And that I think that makes it hard for us really to get a handle on childhood food insecurity.
Bio
Christina M. Gibson-Davis is a professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, with a secondary appointment in sociology. Her research interests center around social and economic differences in family formation patterns. Her current research focuses on the how divergent patterns of family formation affect economic inequality.
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Diet-related disease such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes create a crushing burden on individuals, families, and the healthcare system in the United States. However, Produce Prescription Programs where medical professionals prescribe fruits and vegetables and health insurers pay, promise to improve nutrition and health. Today we will talk with Dr. Kurt Hager from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and lead author of the largest assessment of Produce Prescription Programs to date.
Interview Summary
So, let's get into it. Before we dig into the study itself, can you tell our listeners more about Produce Prescription Programs?
So, the programs that we evaluated in our study gave participants electronic cards. So, either a debit card, a gift card, or a loyalty card that they could use at retail grocery stores and some farmer market partners as well to get free fruits and vegetables of their choice. The food could be either fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables. These programs acknowledge that nutrition education alone likely is not sufficient to increase healthier eating for many low-income households, for which just the cost of healthier foods is really the primary barrier in improving their diet. These programs seek to overcome that barrier, and it's really exciting to see that clinics across the country are turning to these. I think physicians, from our conversations with the clinics we partnered with in this study, are really excited to have a tool they can use and provide to patients to offer higher-quality care and help improve their nutrition when they're talking with their patients about managing diet-related illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, or obesity.
Thank you, Kurt. Could you tell me a little bit about why you and the team decided to do this particular study?
Food insecurity has been consistently associated with poor health outcomes, higher healthcare costs, and lower dietary quality. Many food insecure households tend to have higher rates of diet-related chronic illnesses. We worked with a wonderful organization called Wholesome Wave. They have operated Produce Prescription Programs across the US, and they have been collecting data on these programs for about five years now. Wholesome Wave reached out to our research team at Tufts University's Friedman School. They wanted to see if these programs are working at improving health outcomes. The key thing, I think, to contextualize where this study stands, is prior to this work, there had been a handful of studies that had shown, not surprisingly, that Produce Prescription Programs can improve dietary quality and improve food insecurity. However, very few had gone that extra step to see if Produce Prescription Programs were associated with improvements in really important clinical outcomes. Things like hemoglobin A1C, which is an important measure of average blood sugar levels in the past three months. This is critical for managing diabetes, and outcomes like blood pressure and obesity and overweight. Previous studies had found mixed results on these outcomes, and most had been very small, maybe about 50 participants. We built on this by doing the largest analysis to date. Our study had nearly 4,000 participants from 22 programs across the US, from 12 states. These ranged from cities like Los Angeles to Minneapolis, to Houston, to Miami, Idaho - so all over the US.
So, it was the fact that previous studies have had relatively small samples, and some of these other studies did not take all of the sort of important measures of health into consideration. So, you were able to build on that past work in a unique way in this study?
Exactly. I think the key thing is that Wholesome Wave had excellent relationships with their partner clinics. This meant that the clinics were willing to share medical record data with us. This is always just very challenging and many other studies weren't able to go that extra step. We were blessed with access to a lot of medical record data and we were able to do analyses that looked at important clinical biomarkers. I will say though, our study is a step in the progression. I'll be the first to admit, we did not have a comparison group in this analysis. So, the results that we found also could have occurred due to other reasons. Such as, for example, perhaps when someone is referred to a Produce Prescription Program, their physician might also make other referrals, or perhaps change their medications because this patient has been identified as high need. We certainly built on previous literature by having a much larger sample size and pooling data across the US, and to me, our findings really provide us with a strong rationale to continue research into this area. But also, to confirm our findings with randomized trials similar to what you would do, for example, for drug research.
That is helpful to hear. One of the things that's really important about what I understand of this study is the fact that you worked with Wholesome Wave, and that allowed you access to a lot of different programs across the US as you described. Could you give us a little bit of a sense of what some of those programs were, and how did they provide the support that you were able to study in this project?
Most programs provided the benefits on electronic card. It's similar to in WIC or SNAP, where participants have an EBT card, they can use it at retail settings. It's administratively very simple. From interviews among SNAP participants and other research, this tends to be lower stigma - when you're using a card at a checkout. These cards gave about $50 a month for six months on average for the adult programs, and $110 a month for the pediatric programs. Some of the children's programs were also a little longer. Some of the child-focused programs that we include in the analysis were up to 10 months.
So I understand from this description that the Produce Prescription Programs also look different. There were some programs for children, some for adults. How did you manage that? There's a lot of other things that could be going on. How do you sort of do that in this work?
Participants were referred to these programs because they were either food insecure or were recruited from a clinic that served a low income community and were very likely to be food insecure. Individuals also had a risk factor for poor cardiometabolic health. So, this means that they either had diabetes, high blood pressure, or were overweight or obese at baseline. That was really the common thread across all of these programs. We did all the analyses for adults and children separately. So, we report changes in fruit and vegetable intake, and changes in self-reported health status separately. Food insecurity - we did assess at the household level, but then for other outcomes, for example, hemoglobin A1C, we restricted that to the adult population that had diabetes when they enrolled into the program. For blood pressure, we restricted those analyses to adults with hypertension at baseline. For Body Mass Index, we restricted analyses to adults who were overweight or obese at baseline, and then did those same analyses separately for children for age and sex, only looking at children with overweight or obesity at the start of the study.
This is really important then. Thank you for that clarification. You know, you've talked about some of these critical measures such A1C for diabetes. You've talked about obesity measured in BMI. Can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of these findings and what they mean in real terms for participants' health?
Absolutely. So, we found that participation was associated with improvements in dietary quality and food insecurity. For example, among adults, they were reporting that they were eating, on average, about 0.8 more cups per day of fruits and vegetables by the program end. And food insecurity rates were cut by about a third. So, the program seemed to be working as intended, which was excellent to see. But then looking at the clinical biomarkers, for example, hemoglobin A1C among those with diabetes dropped by 0.3 percentage points. And among those with uncontrolled diabetes, those having chronically high blood sugars that are very difficult to manage, dropped by about 0.6 percentage points. So, to put that in context, that's about half the effects of commonly prescribed medications to manage high blood sugar levels. So, for just a simple change in diet, that is I think fairly impressive and very encouraging to see. And the effects on the reductions on blood pressure were also about half as large as we would see with commonly prescribed medications. I think it's really important to highlight that, one, we don't know if these changes will be sustained long-term when the program ends. There might be some participants where this program caught them in a moment of crisis perhaps, in which this helped stabilize them, and maybe they would be able to maintain these new improvements in dietary intake long-term. But I suspect many participants might not be able to maintain this healthier eating because the cost of healthier foods was the main barrier to healthier eating at the onset of the program. And so, this is an area that we're really interested in looking at in future research. But I will say, if one were to maintain these improvements that we would see in hemoglobin A1C, blood pressure, and BMI among adults, they really were clinically meaningful. And if sustained long-term, it could reduce risks of things like heart attack or stroke years down the line. Any reduction in these biomarkers can really have a meaningful impact on patient quality of life. Things even like averting diabetes complications with damage to the circulatory system, to nerves, to the retinas in the eyes and having vision loss. So, sustained long term, I think these really are meaningful impacts on health and wellbeing. The last thing I'll say, is for children, we did not see a change in BMIs for age and sex. I'm not too surprised, given it's a relatively short program on average six months. But also, child BMI is a notoriously challenging metric to move. But I do want to highlight that among the households with children, we did see an improvement in fruit and vegetable intake, and reduction in food insecurity, and self-reported rates of higher health status. And I think if we're thinking about childhood development, to me, that is still an important success. We know that having enough access to food in the household and having higher dietary quality is really, really important for childhood development and wellbeing. There's certainly a nutrition causal pathway here. But it's important not to forget that there's so much stress and anxiety when someone is experiencing food insecurity, about not knowing necessarily where your next meal is going to come from. Just worrying constantly about managing household budget, about trade-offs, say between buying healthier food, paying for medications, paying for other needs. So, I suspect these programs are improving health outcomes both through a nutritional pathway, but also through like a mental health pathway, perhaps reducing anxiety for some households as well, which can also have an impact on things like blood pressure.
So, given these results, it says that there's some important implications of these Produce Prescription Programs for the health and wellbeing of the participants in this study. I mean the fact that just changing fruit and vegetable consumption through a program like this had an effect similar to half the effect of some medications is really a powerful finding. I have got to ask, what are the policy implications of this work?
There is very exciting momentum across the US federal programs, promoting produce prescriptions and other forms of, for better or worse, what is known as food as medicine. And these programs all provide free healthy food to patients in partnership with the healthcare system or through a physician's office. So, Produce Prescriptions are the focus of this study, but the other Federal programs also include things like medically tailored meals, which are healthy, home-delivered meals, often to patients with even more advanced chronic disease who also might have activity limitations or disabilities that makes it really challenging for them to shop and cook independently. Last fall there was a historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition & Health, in which the Biden administration in the summer prior engaged at a national level, major stakeholders in the anti-hunger space, large health systems, researchers, and government agencies to bring together a policy agenda to address hunger in the US, and the really high rates of diet-related chronic diseases. And it's important to note that, I think it is the first recommendation in the section of the final national strategy from this White House conference under the healthcare sector highlights Produce Prescriptions as a policy priority and expanding them in Medicare and Medicaid. So currently Medicaid, which is the federal health insurance program for individuals with low incomes or who have a disability, Medicaid is managed in partnership between each state and the federal government. And this means that states have some flexibility in how they manage their Medicaid program. They can apply for what is known as Section 1115 waivers. The federal government can approve these waivers if the state makes a good case that if they propose an innovative pilot, an innovative change, that they can make the case is likely to improve health outcomes and remain budget neutral, then the federal government can approve them to pilot this idea. So, currently in Massachusetts, we are several years into an 1115 pilot that is actually paying for produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals through the state Medicaid program. And currently about 10,000 people in Massachusetts have received some sort of nutrition support through the state Medicaid program. About 10 other states now have either similar waivers approved or pending approval to allow other Medicaid programs to do something similar. So, this is a really exciting area where expanding access to these programs is happening. And then in Medicare, which is the health insurance program for older adults, in Medicare Part C, which is the Medicare private health plans, those health plans can choose to cover Produce Prescriptions as a benefit. They're not required to, but they have the flexibility to offer that service if they would like. And then finally, I'll just say that there's also new pilots that were announced in Indian Health Services and the Veterans Health Administration. All these examples show that across the federal government there are exciting pilots and expansions occurring to cover Produce Prescriptions, and other foods and medicine programs. However, they remain unavailable to the vast majority of Americans who might benefit. And so, they're not a core component of any of those programs at the moment. And rather, these are pilots that are being tested, but very exciting movement, nonetheless.
Thank you for that really comprehensive set of examples of how policy is implicated in this work and potentially the need to expand this work. It makes me think of USDA's Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program. That would be another way that folks could access some of the benefits of federal dollars to support produce-type prescription programs. How do you hope to build off this study in future research?
At UMass Medical School, we're the official independent evaluator for the state Section 1115 waiver, which means we are essentially responsible for evaluating if things like the Produce Prescription Program in the Massachusetts Medicaid program is improving health outcomes. So, that is what we are working on right now. In our partnership with the state, we actually have access to all of the claims and encounters data within Medicaid. And we also are working with several health systems that are also sharing medical record data with us so we can evaluate the impacts of food as medicine programs on hemoglobin A1C, blood pressure, and BMI, so similar outcomes to this study. We actually have a large study funded by the NIH in partnership with former colleagues at Tufts University that is doing a deep dive on the Medicaid medically tailored meal program. And we're hoping to do something similar for the Produce Prescription Program in Massachusetts Medicaid. And the nice thing about these studies, they aren't randomized trials. Since this is a kind of a policy rollout, anyone who's eligible for these programs can receive the benefits. But we will be improving upon this study that we just published by leveraging two really strong comparison groups, and using some statistical techniques to make sure we're identifying patients who are as similar as possible to those who are receiving services, but ultimately didn't enroll. So, we're excited to have these results a couple years down the line and see if these programs are working in the context of a large state Medicaid pilot.
Bio
Kurt Hager is an Instructor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Hager’s interests lay at the intersection of structural determinants of health, food insecurity, and government nutrition and health programs. He is currently evaluating the effectiveness of the Flexible Services Program, which addresses food and housing insecurity in Massachusetts Medicaid. His involvement in state and federal policy initiatives underscores his commitment to translating science into policy, including initiatives with the Task Force on Hunger, Nutrition and Health and the National Produce Prescription Collaborative.
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Does the term Policy Advocate conjure up the image of a chef? Today we're speaking with Katherine Miller, Founding Executive Director of the Chef Action Network, and author of the book "At The Table, The Chef's Guide to Advocacy". Katherine formerly served as the Vice President of Impact at the James Beard Foundation and serves as an adjunct professor at the Culinary Institute of America. She's worked for 20 years at the intersection of policy, politics, and social impact, and says chefs have an important role to play in this space.
Interview Summary
Chefs are more and more visible in this advocacy and policy space. I assume that they've been doing this for a long time, but you see more attention to it now, which is nice. Let's talk about sort of its fundamental concept of chefs being involved in the food system at this level. Why do you think chefs and other people in the restaurant industry are equipped to make the food system more just and sustainable?
I think that chefs are some of the greatest translators, right? Chefs, as we know them, are the people who cook us delicious meals or host us for events in our lives. But in reality they are taking the ingredients from the farmers and producers and fishermen and translating them to the plate to make them interesting and enjoyable for all of us, right? And the food system is incredibly complicated. It is deeply rooted. The root system overlaps and is incredibly complex. It's off-putting for people to think about how they might get involved in food policy or even understand the different controls on our food. Chefs can really help tell a better story, right? They can take the what's happening in the field and on the boats, and then they can put it on our plate, and they can help explain to us the stories behind all the food, how it's grown, the things that we should be interested in, the decisions that we should make differently. I think they're the ultimate translators and making the world a more delicious place.
That makes perfect sense! What inspired you to write your book, "At The Table"?
I've been working with the chef community for 10 years, first as a consultant and the founder of the Chef Action Network, and then working with the James Beard Foundation as the first vice president of advocacy and impact for the foundation. Then, after leaving the foundation, continued to work with organizations who are really interested in helping chefs step into policy arenas on things like healthy soils or food waste or medically-tailored meals. All those things are impacted by the policies that our state houses and our federal houses. And it's hard. The restaurant industry is enormous. There are 11 million or so restaurant employees. There are tens of thousands of people who are considered chefs or leaders in the kitchen, and we weren't going to reach them one Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change at a time. You know, when I left the foundation in 2020 at the sort of tail end of the first year of COVID, we had over 1000 people on the waiting list to get into the Chef's Bootcamp for Policy and Change. We knew we were on to something, but we didn't really have the capacity to expand at scale. So, you know the great thing about a book is it can reach many chefs, culinary students, restaurant workers, farmers. And that's the other thing - I think there's a sort of duality to this idea of chef. It's really anybody who's a food system leader, anybody who is really interested in how the policies control our food system. I'm very excited to have a book out because I wanted this message and the examples and the tips and tools to reach the biggest audience that it could.
Boy, it's nice to hear there's so much interest among chefs and work of this type. I'm interested in whether this kind of thing is finding its way into culinary education. You have a position at the Culinary Institute of America, highly visible place. Is this the sort of thing that's showing up in discussions in culinary schools and classes and the training people receive?
More and more. I really credit Robert Egger for so many things in life, the great food system advocate and co-founder of DC Central Kitchen. But Robert was one of the first to write an op-ed that was like, culinary education should include advocacy, right? Because in culinary schools all over the country and all over the world, we teach people about flavor, we teach people about dish composition, we teach people about cleaning their station, and being a good person on the line, right? But we don't teach them about sustainability and that concerted way, we don't teach them business school skills and we don't really teach them about policies that impact their business, their sourcing, the way they run their restaurants. So that is growing. I think it's also a benefit of this next generation of chefs and consumers even who are really leading with their values. They want to see people step into this arena. The Edelman Trust Survey, which comes out every year, shows that food systems and food communities are some of the most trusted networks in the world. These leaders of that community have sort of a right, but also an obligation to get involved. The thing I like about the book and the thing I love teaching is that it's easy to do. It's not as difficult as you think it is, but I really think that the students and the consumers are demanding a sort of values-based approach. We're going to see all of the culinary schools add at least one class, if not more, of this type of training, I think in the future.
Let's go a little bit deeper into the bootcamp. You've directed the James Beard Foundation's Chefs Bootcamp for Policy and Change. Can you describe what goes on at the camp, and how this has affected your view on the chef's role in the advocacy world?
The Chef's Bootcamp for Policy and Change was an idea that Chef Michel Nischan and a James Beard trustee by the name of Eric Kessler had the idea for way back in 2012. They found me because I am a experienced trainer and facilitator. I've worked all over the world with, whether it be land advocates in Nigeria, health experts in China, folks in Australia, democracy in Lebanon, and they approached me and they said, “Hey, we have this idea. Chefs are highly visible. They are celebrities in their own right and we want to help them better use their voice.” That first bootcamp took place in July of 2012. We trained the first 15 chef advocates, and the penny sort of dropped for me that this was a community who are sitting in every single street corner. They have visible storefronts in every single community in America. They are trusted not to kill us, right? They are trusted to deliver something delicious and an amazing experience. They are networked heavily through the producers, both within their region and their city, but also globally in terms of what they source and how they buy. They have an authentic connection to fans, right? The bootcamp, which still continues to this day, trains 15 to 20 advocates at a time. The training module is still the same it was with a few tweaks in 2012. We really put them through their paces on introducing them to this food system and the complications of the food system. They also did role plays and learned techniques on how to be a better advocate. So how to create a message, how to reach out to their networks, how to use their social media profiles to talk about advocacy. And also, how to deal with the sort of haters of the world who might be like, "Shut up and get back to the kitchen". So, a little bit of that. Then the other piece that is so important to the entire food movement is created community amongst themselves. Every bootcamp ends with a dinner cooked by the chefs, for the chefs together with what they source on the working agricultural farm that would take them to. That community then spills out and it grows and grows. So exponentially, you could grow from 15 to 150 to 1000. They take it with them, they teach their staff, they host their own bootcamps or programming in their own cities. So, the bootcamp is one piece of it, but it's really about giving people the tips and tools they need to be an advocate, and then creating community amongst the chefs themselves and also their staffs and their greater community, and really just putting them into the places where they can use their voice to make a difference.
You know, it sounds really exciting! So, you have talked us through the process of how this education and training on advocacy and policy takes place. But let's talk a little bit more about the issues. Let's just say the Chef's Bootcamp was happening today and we walked in and we could overhear the discussions. What would we hear people talking about? Would they be talking about how children can be educated about food, about sustainable food systems and regenerative agriculture? Would they be talking about? state law, federal policy? What kind of issues would be important to them today?
Today? The Farm Bill, right? Chefs do advocacy in three places really. They do it on the table, right, through what they source, how they market to their customers, the types of labor practices they have in their own restaurant, like that is a self a form of advocacy. They do it within their community. So, a lot of chefs will get involved with local feeding organizations, will get involved with school gardens, things that they can put their hands on and bring people into their restaurant or visit regularly. I see a lot of community interaction. Then there's the hard and long work of state and federal policy reform. We are not going to be able to just uproot our entire food system and throw it out the window. Policy reform is gradual. It takes time and it takes a concerted effort. So, throughout each bootcamp or throughout different programs that I do, say with the Natural Resources Defense Council or programs that are run through No Kid Hungry, where alumni of the bootcamp have really gone on to shine is this federal policy piece. If you walked into a bootcamp today, you'd probably be hearing information about the Farm Bill, the impact of the Farm Bill on local regional food systems, the impact of the Farm Bill on food as medicine programs and SNAP programs, and really looking for ways a chef or a food system advocate could use their voice effectively to make the case for greater funding, to protect funding, to really encourage more progressive policies.
That sounds good. You brought up the Farm Bill, so let's talk about that in a little more detail. The last Farm Bill was passed in 2018, so it needs to be passed again now and reauthorized. Vast amounts of money are at stake for this. You mentioned that chefs can advocate for protecting funds that have been used in the past for particular purposes, and also argue for new uses of funds. What would be some of the top priorities? You kind of alluded to several of these, but tell us a little bit more specifically about what the chefs might be fighting for.
The Farm Bill is our food bill. I think we don't say that often enough. I think when we look at how the Farm Bill is constructed, we are looking at programs that are everything from specialty crops, i.e., fruits and vegetables, to the Supplemental Nutrition Programs that help people in times of need to not go hungry, to food as medicine programs that help us reach vulnerable populations with more fruits and vegetables at farmer's markets or medically tailored meals in hospitals or in systems. The Farm Bill reaches into all of those things. One thing I like to say about chefs is they're not monolithic. They're not all running around saying this thing. They are well-informed narrators and translators of a complicated food system and encouraging people to pay more attention to things like the Farm Bill and more things like the political nature of our food system.
If we want in the long term to redirect subsidies to support more climate smart agriculture, or help us have local and resilient food systems, that's going to happen through the Farm Bill. I was just recently with a bunch of chefs who were on Capitol Hill talking about healthy soil and the need to incentivize farmers through a bill called the Cover Act to help them change growing practices so that their soils would be healthier, and they could do more regenerative agriculture techniques. In a few weeks, there will be folks here really advocating to protect SNAP benefits. I think as we see a growing partisan divide and the growing divide on how to spend government money, SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is always going to be a constant target of that.
There's a great anecdote in the book by chef Elle Simone, who talks very eloquently and proudly about the fact that at an early point in her life, she took SNAP benefits. She was broke, and she was financially insecure, and she needed help. She took those SNAP benefits at a time when she needed them, and they helped her complete her education and complete her path to the future. Now, she's a cookbook author and the first woman of color to be on America's Test Kitchen. She is a known celebrity chef around the country, and she wouldn't be there, she will always say, if it hadn't been for SNAP. So, somebody like Elle will come to Capitol Hill and tell that story to put a human face on a program that is often demonized by people who think there are other ways to spend money rather than make sure that people don't come hungry.
You know, there's a lot built into what you just said on lots of different levels. SNAP program, relationships with farmers, et cetera. Let's talk about farmers for a moment. I know that chefs have, of course, always had a strong relationship with farmers because that's where they secure what they serve in their restaurants, but it sounds like it's going beyond that. This alliance now is out there in the bigger policy arena around issues of regenerative agriculture and things like that. I'm assuming you've seen some interesting cases of farmers and the chef community coming together to argue for a common purpose.
Chefs and farmers are natural partners. There wouldn't be any food on our plates if there weren't for farmers. The types of food and the types of vegetables and meat, and even seafood, fishermen, the world, you wouldn't be able to put things on the plate without those humans. They produce amazing, delicious food, and they do it in ways that are better for the environment. It's nutritionally dense. So, they're a natural partnership, but they haven't always worked together. In part, because they had completely opposite schedules. The farmers are up at 5:00 AM and go to bed at 2:00 PM and you know, chefs are out until 5:00 AM, and at work, they haven't always been able to come together. But more intentionally, organizations are bringing them together. The Natural Resource Defense Council is working a lot with zero food print as a chef-led organization. Those two organizations are working in deep partnership to put chefs and farmers together regularly on Capitol Hill or in state houses, talking about things like the Cover Act, talking about regenerative agriculture, talking about the health that's contained in our soil and how that translates into healthier and more delicious food. They are natural partners, and I'm really excited that they seem to be coming together more on common issues that really are about putting healthy and delicious things in front of us all.
Well, it makes good sense that those kind of partnerships have evolved to where they are now. Let me ask you a final question. Well, let's just say I'm a chef and I meet you or people involved in this kind of sphere of work, and I'm thinking, boy, my life is pretty crazy. It's a high stress life, very long hours, lots of decisions to be made and people to supervise, and all kinds of stuff going on in these restaurants. How in the world would I have time to do anything like this? And then also, what are the actionable steps that such a chef might take to help create a better food system?
It's a great question, right? We're all really busy people. Everybody's calendar is full, whether it's kids or parents to take care of, whether it's jobs, whether it's volunteering, and we all look at our calendars, and we're like. How could I possibly fit one thing else in here? The number one tip I give chefs and anybody who really wants to be an advocate is you learn to say no first. You learn to look at what you care most about and decide that that is the thing that you are going to focus on. And all the rest of it, you're going to say no very politely to. So, in the beginning of work with chefs, I did an audit of dozens of restaurants and essentially chefs were being asked to donate on average about $50,000 each year to dozens of organizations in their local community and even nationally. When we think about that from a fundraising perspective, if you donated $50,000 to one organization, you would be a top donor to that organization. You would have a totally different relationship with them. I really encourage all of us, but especially the chef community, to take a deep look at the issue that drives you most, whether it's hunger, the environment, ending violence in our communities, mentorship, whatever it is. And really, one, pick that issue and prioritize that issue. Get to know the organizations and the experts that are already working in it, right? We all think that we're so smart and we must be the first people to have thought about X, Y, and Z, and you're not, right? There are lots of experts in the field, and there are now even experts in the field of chef advocacy. There are dozens of organizations actually in the appendix of my book that point you in the direction of different issues that you might want to get involved in. So, get to know the experts. And number three, take a baby step. Schedule an appointment with an organization, sign a petition, do some research. Just take a baby step into, okay, now I'm going to learn more. Now I'm going to do something. And it doesn't have to be a big thing. And then your advocacy will go from there. I'm a political activist at heart, and I want everybody to make sure that they're registered to vote, and vote because that is the ultimate form of advocacy and probably the biggest baby step that we can all take once we've picked an issue and become informed on that issue. There are other tips and tools in the book. I'm all about opening conversation, not closing conversation. So I really encourage people through the book and through some exercises in it to figure out their own narrative that opens conversation, their own set of questions that turns them into sort of active listeners and not lecturers. I think food certainly has enough judgment in it that it doesn't need advocates pointing fingers at each other, talking about how one's point of view is better than the others. It's really simple to get involved. The first step is say no. Pick the one issue that's most important to you. Do the work and get to know the issues and the experts. Take a baby step, register to vote, vote, and then you can grow from there.
Bio
Named an industry leader and “Fixer” by Grist magazine and called one of the most innovative women in food and beverage by Fortune and Food & Wine magazines, Katherine Miller was the founding executive director of the Chef Action Network and the former vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation. She was the first food policy fellow at American University’s Sine Institute of Policy and Politics and is a Distinguished Terker Fellow at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Miller has built a 20-year career working at the intersections of policy, politics, and social impact. She develops and manages award-winning campaigns, trains activists around the world, and helps deliver millions of supporters – and hundreds of millions in funding – to efforts focused on global health, climate change, gender bias and violence, and food system reform. She is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) and serves on the Board of Directors of both the New Venture Fund and Re:Her DC. Miller is an adjunct professor at the Culinary Institute of America. She lives in Washington DC, on the land of the Anacostan and Nacotchtank people, with her husband, Lou, and their cat, Lily.
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With record-breaking food prices in 2022, it has become more expensive for families to buy the foods that they need. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, helps families purchase foods but families frequently spend their benefits before the next benefit cycle. USDA modifies SNAP benefits every year as a cost-of-living adjustment. But was the change in fiscal year 2023 enough to keep pace with food price inflation? Today, we talk with Elaine Waxman from the Urban Institute to find out.
Interview Summary
You recently completed an analysis on the gap between SNAP benefits and the real cost of a meal. Can you tell us what you found?
Absolutely. I think it helps to start with the fact that for many households, SNAP is a supplement to their budget that they would spend on food. But for about four in 10 households, it is their food budget. In other words, they're deemed to have zero income available to purchase food. What we've done is look at how adequate is the benefit for those households, the ones that receive the maximum benefit. Given overall questions about SNAP adequacy, but because there's such wide variation in geographic food prices, something that I think we all know intuitively based on our everyday lives but don't realize that, in fact in the lower 48 states, SNAP is not adjusted for any of those differences in food prices. It doesn't matter if you live in rural Texas or rural Idaho or on the Coast, your benefit is the same if you're receiving that maximum benefit. What we find is that particularly, based on those experiences in 2022 that we all felt when we showed up at the cash register, 99% of counties in the US had cost for what we would call a moderately priced meal that exceeded the maximum SNAP benefit when we think about that on a per-meal basis. So that was very concerning obviously because people have been relying very heavily on SNAP throughout the pandemic. For a period, there were extra benefits, what is known as emergency allotments, but those have gone away now. As you mentioned at the start, we do get a yearly cost of living adjustment and it was pretty big last year compared to most years and it did help, but the maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a meal in 78% of count. So that's an improvement from 99% to 78%. But clearly, in the majority of the US, we're still not really able to fully tap the value of SNAP. And since SNAP is a big part of our strategy for reducing food insecurity, that's something we should all be concerned about.
I think this is really important for listeners to understand. There aren't regional adjustments in the SNAP benefits and there are huge price differences depending on where you are in the US. I know some work out of the Economic Research Service of USDA found that same finding in some earlier years. And so it's really important to see what happens, especially during an inflationary period. Thank you for sharing that. I want to talk about one way that we understand how SNAP benefits are set. And so, USDA updated the Thrifty Food Plan which is the basis of SNAP benefits or at least the maximum benefit level in 2021, and it was the first time since the mid two-2000s. What did that mean for the adequacy of SNAP benefits? And what do we know about how inflation has further affected SNAP benefits?
Yes, great question. It was a very important move on the part of USDA to implement that update to the Thrifty Food Plan, which basically is the market basket of assumptions about food purchasing that USDA relies on to set all SNAP benefits. So it's a critical piece of information. Even though it might sound like inside baseball, to some people, the Thrifty Food Plan really matters. As you noted, it had not been updated since I think 2006. And we all know that not only have prices changed a lot, but the ways in which we acquire food has changed a lot. We buy a lot more prepared foods even to eat at home. A lot more people are working and so the assumption that you can cook everything from scratch doesn't really hold for a lot of households anymore. a number of those assumptions were updated. And for a period, that made a big improvement in that SNAP maximum benefit that we just talked about. Unfortunately, that was eroded by the pretty unprecedented rise in food prices throughout 2022, which of course, partly relates to supply chain issues that emerged during the pandemic. The Ukraine war has certainly had a significant impact on food supply chains. The upshot was we had food price increases that we hadn't seen since the early 1970s. So that's where we were this time last year in terms of the maximum benefit, even with those improvements back to not covering the vast majority of counties in terms of cost adequacy. That cost-of-living adjustment helps somewhat, but I think the lesson we should take from this is that we have an underlying adequacy problem with the Thrifty Food Plan. It's really a bare bones assumption set, and a lot of folks have advocated that we move away from that to something that's called the low-cost food plan. It's a little bit more generous. It's a sort of bare bones basic shopping, but the Thrifty Food Plan may just not be the right template anymore. And if we want to tackle the persistent issue of food insecurity in this country, we've got to deal with this underlying SNAP adequacy issue.
I think this is really an important issue. I want to push a little bit further on the Thrifty Food Plan itself in terms of what it means. Please correct me if I get it wrong. It's this idea of a least-cost diet that is nutritionally adequate. It's looking at the dietary guidelines to help provide constraints to make sure people are eating a nutritious meal and it's also based off a minimum cost expenditure for what that diet would look like. It's based off a family of two adults and two children, and it doesn't incorporate lots of different family structures. Is that a fair assessment? And are there then some concerns about what the Thrifty Food Plan is?
I think what you're suggesting is basically correct and one of the issues about the Thrifty Food Plan is that when it was first developed, it really wasn't envisioned as a sustainable diet. It was really more of an emergency sort of meal plan. Like you're very strapped for resources, you can provide minimal nutrition for your household. But this is not what we want for people on an ongoing basis. One of the problems about the assumptions in the Thrifty Food Plan has also been that when we think about a household of two adults and two children, well, children eat really differently depending on their age, right? A five-year old doesn't eat anything like a 15-year-old. There are a lot of issues around household composition, but also just what do we mean when we say we want nutrition security for people, right? We want people to be able to eat healthfully in a sustaining way and I really think our ongoing look at SNAP adequacy suggests we're not there. We're not leveraging the tools we need to tackle not only food insecurity, but the fact that we have an epidemic of chronic diet-sensitive disease in this country.
Thank you for that. You know, this raises important questions about policy frame and the policy space around food access and food security. The Farm Bill is usually the legislative vehicle for making major changes to SNAP. But this past spring, the debt ceiling debate negotiations resulted in adjustments in the SNAP work requirements for some groups and new exemptions for others. What changes were made? And more broadly, what does research tell us about the impact of work requirements and time limits?
It's been an interesting year, to say the least, for the progress of the Farm Bill. Just to remind everybody, the Farm Bill is that place that we normally make major changes and reauthorize significant federal nutrition programs like SNAP roughly every five years. This year, the debt ceiling negotiations sort of preempted a lot of the ongoing discussion in preparing for the Farm Bill, because it took up this issue of time limits specifically focused on benefits for what we call individuals who are able-bodied adults without dependents. Sometimes, you'll hear the term ABAWD. I prefer not to use it because people are not the policy, but it's really focused on single adults who don't have custodial children. The idea is that if you are not able to meet a minimum work requirement of 80 hours a month or equivalent activities, you are limited to three months of benefits in a 36-month period. So that's extremely draconian, especially when we think about what we all know about the instability of low-wage work, right? And in periods where we have widespread unemployment, like we did for a bit in the pandemic, we have the ability to waive those requirements for everyone but they are now coming back. In addition to them coming back, they are now being increased in terms of the number of people it will cover based on the debt ceiling deal. It used to be folks 18 to 49. It will phase in now for people up to age 55, which is also an interesting thing. Because as people age, they sometimes have less ability to be flexible in the workplace and to move into new positions. There's a whole another conversation we could have about that. I guess a bright side of the debt ceiling bill was that it also created some new exemptions for those requirements, and they were focused on very specific groups including veterans, people who are unhoused, and young adults moving out of foster care. So those are all groups that we know are particularly vulnerable when it comes to just monthly finances and their ability to engage in the workplace. And that's a good thing but it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of other folks out there who have other significant challenges that ought to be recognized. And because it's a very sort of discretionary kind of process, we don't even have confidence that everyone in those groups we just talked about would actually receive a waiver. So why does all this matter? It matters because there's quite a body of research now that suggests that these time limits and work requirements don't do what they set out to do, which is to meaningfully increase either work effort or household income. They don't really accomplish the stated goal. They also cost money because you have to administer them and have a lot more interaction with the clients. And not only then do they not achieve those work goals, but they actually push a lot of people off of SNAP and/or trim them through, as we call people who move in and out because of administrative problems. What we have is a group who already has higher than typical food insecurity rates. We're making it more difficult for them to engage in SNAP. And SNAP is our number one tool for reducing food insecurity from the federal program portfolio. On balance, I think a lot of folks in the food security space would argue that time limits should just go away, right? That's not where we should be putting our investment if we want people to have more self-sufficiency and if we want them to eat better.
I really do appreciate the way you are humanizing the experiences of individuals who may depend on SNAP, but as the new policies are being implemented, may age out in a strange way. This is really a useful way for us to understand the implications of when we make decisions or changes to policy, it can have really negative consequences and may not achieve the goals that are at least stated. This is an important part of this conversation. But we're looking at a federal shutdown and if an agreement isn't reached, we could see some serious implications for families. Some lawmakers are calling for across the board cuts of most discretionary spending programs as part of any agreement. Would those cuts affect federal nutrition programs?
Good question, so the short answer is it's just going to be generally disruptive across the board, but the type of program does matter. So SNAP is what we call an entitlement which means that anybody who is eligible for it will receive those benefits on an ongoing basis. But another very important program that many people are familiar with is called WIC and that is a program focused on prenatal care and postpartum care for moms and infants and children up to the age of five. WIC reaches millions of children across the country, and it is not an entitlement program, which means that it's subject to an annual budget. We already have a problem with the WIC budget this year because we've had bigger increases in enrollment than were expected. I think that speaks to this issue about the continuing pressure of food prices, the loss of other pandemic supports at a time when families are still struggling to navigate basic needs. We've had more pressure on the WIC program and there was already concern that there would not be sufficient funds, let alone going into a shutdown situation. The administration has estimated that there will be a significant impact on families who will not be able to receive WIC if the shutdown were to persist. And then the bigger issue is that the time that we invest, so to speak, in shutdowns is time we're not working on the Farm Bill and having a thorough reassessment of program needs. It's likely to delay the Farm Bill agreements as well. While shutdowns, you know, are obviously very much about politics for people who have to put food on the table every week, some of which are paid for by federal salaries, right? Then this is a very real economic shock and it's unfortunately an economic shock that we could avoid.
Yes, it is important to think about how we can avoid this and reframing this as an issue about politics. But at the end of the day, there are families who are dependent on these policies, and we just had a conversation with Travis Smith at the University of Georgia about what happens when kids roll off WIC and that sort of in-between time before they enter school and that had this negative effect on the nutritional quality that these children consumed. And you can imagine that if there are disruptions in WIC while it's a smaller program than SNAP, it has important implications for the wellbeing of the families that use it. This is an important time and I'm hopeful that we will move past this impasse. Discussions about how to strengthen healthy eating for the US population are ever present. And this is particularly true for those individuals who participate in the SNAP program. What proposals are being considered for SNAP and how could we see any of those in the Farm Bill?
This is a really important topic because we actually have an evidence-based strategy for increasing the ability to purchase healthier foods like fresh fruits and vegetables and that is what they call nutrition incentives. Some people will know it as Double Up Bucks, but basically, they're programs that allow people to receive additional money for SNAP if it's put towards those kinds of purchases. That's something that's been evaluated over the last several years and seems to do exactly what we want, which is to increase those purchases. Unfortunately, it's a grant program. It's not an integral part of SNAP. It very much depends on where you live and what year it is as to whether you can access that kind of program. We're underutilizing a tool that's already there and the Farm Bill does currently reauthorize that grant program. Some people will maybe know it as what's referred to as GA/SNAP grants. But we did an analysis and showed that while they do a good job of targeting GA/SNAP grants to areas of high food insecurity, there's still lots of high food insecurity areas that don't have one available, and they're always time limited to a few years. We're not using the knowledge that we've already gained to accomplish this goal again that we're beginning to talk about, which is to really focus on nutrition security and not just basic adequacy of diet. The other thing that people often raise is, well, perhaps we should restrict purchases of certain kinds of benefits. And I think, in general, we find that Americans don't respond well to those kinds of limitations. And a concern, I think, that the food security space has about restrictions is that it's potentially very stigmatizing just to low-income people who are using a benefit when the truth is that most of America doesn't eat as well as we need to and that's a larger structural conversation. The upshot is some people would advocate for restrictions on things like soda and candy, maybe other snacks. I think we could all understand why we wouldn't want to prioritize that, but the fact of the matter is that restrictions don't make the other things more affordable, and that is exactly what the nutrition incentives are intended to do.
Bio
Elaine Waxman is a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her expertise includes food insecurity, food access, federal nutrition programs, social determinants of health and broader issues affecting families with low income. Waxman previously served as the Vice President of Research and Nutrition at Feeding America. She has co-authored numerous publications, including an article on SNAP benefit adequacy in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, which was named the journal’s Best Paper in 2019. She received her MPP and PhD from the University of Chicago, where she is a lecturer at the Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice.
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A diversity of bacteria and microorganisms making up the gut microbiome supports both our physical and our mental health. Research has shown that stress and trauma can negatively impact the microbiome. But a recent study took that finding to a new level. This was a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists now see inflammation-related microbiomes in babies born to women who experienced mistreatment or adversity during their own childhood. These microbiomes predispose children to physical and mental health problems. We'll talk today with the co-author of that paper, Fran Querdasi, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Interview hosted by Kelly Brownell.
Interview Summary
This topic is so important, and you just hear time and time again from experts all around the world how profoundly the microbiome was influencing our health and how many factors affect the microbiome. But now to think about this generational matter that you addressed in your research is interesting and scary, in a way. Let's first start off with this question about how you studied these mothers and the children. What were you looking for?
The goal of the study was to see how experiences of adversity or hardship across two generations might be related to the composition of the children's gut microbiome, or in other words, which microbes were living in their guts. So, for this paper, I worked with colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles, as well as a team of scientists in Singapore who are currently conducting a big birth cohort study called Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes, or GUSTO for short. That study has thousands of mothers and families enrolled but, in this paper, we focused on around 450 families who had data on what we were interested in - the mother generation, as well as her child generation. We specifically wanted to study the children when they were around two years old because the gut microbiome develops really rapidly during that period from birth until around two years of age.
In this study, we asked mothers to tell us about three different kinds of adversity. First, their history of maltreatment. That would be things like abuse and neglect in their own childhood and then kind of moving forward in time, any symptoms of anxiety during their pregnancies. Then moving forward again into the children's generation, their children's exposure to stressful life events. So, things like their parents' divorce or the death of a family member from birth till two years of age. At two years of age, we collected poop samples to analyze the children’s microbiomes. Then we also asked families to report on their children's social emotional problems. So, things like aggression, sadness, issues with attention on when they were two years old and then again at age four because we really wanted to see also how their microbiomes were related to their early childhood health.
I'm eager to hear what you found but first, let me say I'm impressed that you even bothered to ask this question because one wouldn't think that traumatic experiences decades ago in the life of a mother would affect the microbiome of a child today. So, tell us, please, what did you find?
We found that each of the adversity experiences that we asked about - so abuse or neglect that the mother experienced in her own childhood, the mothers' symptoms of anxiety during pregnancy, as well as children’s experiences of stressful events in their early life - all of those seem to have an impact on the children’s gut microbiomes. Specifically, we found something interesting, which was that some of the microbes that seem to be related to adversity we think that they might perform similar functions to those that we found were related to the children's social emotional health, both at two years and then at four years of age. We think that those microbes probably play a role in regulating the immune system and inflammation. Our findings kind of hint that maybe disruption to some immune-related functions within the gut could help explain how some children go on to develop mental health struggles after they experience adversity. And how that intergenerational experience of adversity shows up in subsequent generations.
Like I said, it's hard to imagine that things so distinct in timing can have such a big impact. How is it possible that adversity experienced by a mom in her own childhood could affect her child now in terms of the microbiome?
That is pretty surprising. You think that it's so far in the past, but it's really striking that it does still appear to have an impact. This study was the first one to find evidence for that in humans. There have been studies in animal models, researchers that work with rats and mice, and there was evidence the mom's experiences during childhood affect their children's gut microbiome. There is other research that studies this phenomenon, called intergenerational transmission of adversity, and that's when trauma, chronic stress, adversity, those kinds of experiences experienced in one generation have impacts on the following generations. Even in those who have never directly experienced the event. Research has brought up many possible explanations for why that might happen, from changes to gene expression after adversity to changes to the parent's health and behaviors. In terms of the microbiome specifically, it's possible that the mother's health or underlying biology and physiological response to stress was affected by that adversity that she experienced in some way. And that shaped her child's development in terms of brain or stress response systems during her pregnancy. Then, because the microbiome is really connected to other biological systems that had an impact on the microbiome, the mother's microbiome plays a big role in shaping the child's initial microbiome during birth, and then after birth in terms of contact with the child and breastfeeding, things like that. The bottom line is that the mother's microbiome was affected by her adversity and then directly shaped the child's microbiome.
A fascinating set of possibilities you're talking about. Let me ask you a down in the weeds question. How can you isolate the impact of the adverse childhood experiences in the mother in terms of its impact in the microbiome from other things that just might co-occur with the adverse childhood experiences, social disparities, economic disparities, health disparities in general and things like that?
That is definitely really challenging to do, and we did that to some degree in our study. There's definitely a lot of future research that needs to be done to tease apart the different factors that might play into that relationship between the mother's adversity in childhood and her child's microbiome. But we did account for the mother's socioeconomic status in terms of the family's income, and we also accounted for the birth mode of the child, so whether the child was born by C-section or vaginal birth. So, in that sense, we tried to isolate the impact of the mother's adversity.
That makes sense. It sounds like you took care to address that issue. Now let me ask a question about what can be done given this relationship you found. Is there anything that can be done to disrupt this connection? One might think perhaps if the mother had eaten a diet that was specifically designed to optimize the microbiome, would that help, for example?
That's a really important point. There are many things that impact the gut microbiome in addition to adversity experiences. Diet, other things in the environment like exposure to nature and other people, the urbanity of your living environment and overall stress levels as well. That also highlights that many things can be done, both on an individual and societal level to promote a healthy gut microbiome and possibly counteract or mitigate impacts based on adversity. We're very far away from knowing exactly what the perfect way is to address this because there's just so much more that we need to know about the gut microbiome. But there are some general things. We know that eating a variety of foods that have a lot of fibers like fruits and vegetables, that's good for your gut microbiome. So, policies that make those foods more widely accessible and affordable. And then things that can help you manage stress in a healthy way. So, meditation, exercise, really strong supportive social relationships, as well as policy supports for families that reduce financial stress and precarity. Then, in terms of focusing on specifically early life policies that allow parents the time to form positive relationships with their kids, like parental leave and things that help maximize the mother's health broadly. So, affordable perinatal care can set the child up for the best possible start to life. Those are changes that would promote microbiome health broadly in addition to overall health.
Those things all make sense. And the good news is that every one of those things you mentioned would have health and mental health benefits way beyond the microbiome. So, good reason to focus on those things. Now let me ask you one final question. Are you working on follow-up studies to this?
Yes, we are. So, in that study, as I mentioned, we were looking at microbiome composition, which means which microbes live in the gut. We found evidence suggesting that immune functioning was really important, but the methods that we used were not able to test the function of the microbes directly. So, we're following up on this work by looking at the same questions of how adversity experiences impact the microbiome but looking at function of the microbes directly. So, in this group of families that we studied, as well as others, I'm also interested in looking at how adversity might impact communication between the immune system and the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is really intimately connected to other systems. For example, there's many connections between the gut microbiome and the brain and the brain and gut microbiome influence each other. I'm looking at communication between the gut microbiome and brain as well. So, trying to get a more complete and whole-body picture of the processes that are affected by adversity and if those changes relate to mental and physical health and kind of the specifics of how that works and I really hope that that work will open up new ways to treat and prevent health problems in families exposed to adversity.
Bio
Francesca Querdasi, M.A. is a PhD student in developmental psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with minors in health and quantitative psychology. Her research focuses on understanding how experiences of adversity or hardship predispose individuals to develop physical and mental health problems, with a particular focus on depression, anxiety and chronic pain disorders. Her prior work has examined the intergenerational transmission of adversity by way of the gut microbiome, and how adversity is related to communication between the brain and gut microbiome in early childhood. In the future, Fran plans to examine the role of the immune system and immune-gut microbiome communication in the development of mental health problems during the teenage years. The ultimate goal of Fran’s work is to inform new prevention and treatment strategies that promote health and well-being for children and families impacted by adversity.
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I read a study recently featuring a term I had not heard or seen before: "disproportionate beef eaters." The study was done by Dr. Amelia Willits-Smith, Diego Rose and colleagues at Tulane University. So, who are such beef eaters and how are their consumption patterns associated with environment and climate change? Today we're joined by one of the authors of that study, Dr. Diego Rose, who is a professor and nutrition program director in the School of Public Health at Tulane.
Interview Summary
You, your colleagues, and your students do the most interesting work on really important issues, such as how diet lies at the intersection of health and environment. This sort of work is so important because there's a lot of talk about it. But not enough empirical work to really make policy decisions has been done, at least regarding some questions and you're helping fill like gap. I'm really delighted you could talk to us today. Let's start talking about this study. Give us some context if you would. Why did you set out to study the characteristics of disproportionate beef eaters?
Kelly, I've been doing this work for about seven years - working on a connection between diet and climate change. In the early days when I would do presentations on this research, I would always start the presentation with a slide or two of some big government report or intergovernmental report. Sort of legitimizing the whole topic. Now I find that climate change is so connected to people's daily lives whether it's the floods and the heat waves, droughts, fires that that are happening that people know it's a problem. I don't need to preface what I'm saying by that. When people think about climate change, they tend to think about it being caused by the transportation sector, perhaps energy use or construction but they don't tend to think about food systems. But it turns out that human food systems account for a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Most people don't think about that. Within that category, livestock is the most important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. What's more, within livestock it's beef. Beef, it turns out, accounts for eight to 10 times more impact than chicken and over 50 times the impact on greenhouse gas emissions than beans. Naturally, we were concerned about beef. If we were going to do an education campaign to let people know about this, we thought, well, who should we target it to? We should target it to the people that are eating the most of it. And how you would target that? Well, you would set a threshold for what's disproportionate beef consumption and then go about looking at some data to see who's contributing the most to beef consumption.
That makes perfect sense. Let me ask you sort of a fundamental public health question in this context. Sometimes you get a big impact at a public health population level by making big changes in people who are the biggest users of something. Heavy smokers would be an example or heavy drinkers. That's the approach you're taking here. But I know in other cases some people have said that with some consumption patterns that are hard to change, like maybe what people are eating or smoking or drinking, that it makes sense to focus on a different part of the population where you get smaller changes but spread across a larger number of people who are more willing to change, and hence you get a bigger impact. So how do you define who were the disproportionate beef eaters and what were the findings of the study?
To think about disproportionate beef eaters we used the dietary guidelines for Americans. We looked at the healthy US meal plan. The data we had was on daily intakes. That meant that for somebody with a 2200 calorie consumption level that a recommended amount would be four ounces for meat, poultry, and eggs. We thought, well, if you're exceeding the recommended amount with just one of those foods, say beef, where you could be meeting the recommendation with chicken or eggs or even vegetarian if you wanted to, we thought that was disproportionate. So, we used that as a benchmark, for a disproportionate diet. So, what did we find?
Before you do that, let's give people some sense of this. When people talk about a recommended serving of meat, they say something that might be about the size of a deck of cards. Is that four ounces you're talking about? I'm imagining you're talking about people that eat multiples of that.
You can think of four ounces as a quarter pounder, thinking about a burger, except that it's cooked weight. Usually when McDonald's puts out a quarter pounder, that's the raw weight. We're really thinking about one and a quarter or one and a third quarter-pound hamburgers. That's what the threshold is. So, if you're eating more than that, more than one and a quarter, quarter-pounders a day every day, that's what we're considering disproportionate.
Okay, thanks. So, now tell us about what you found in your study.
We found three kinds of things in the study. First, that 12% of people consumed this disproportionate amount of beef. They were more likely to be men, they were less likely to be young people under 30, or older people over 65. They're also less likely to be college graduates. So, those are the kinds of things we were looking at when we went into it. The other things that we saw were that those 12% of people - and this is what really surprised us because we weren't looking for this, but what ended up happening - the 12% of people that are disproportionate beef eaters are consuming 50% of the total beef on any given day. That was the surprise. That's the one that's got all the headlines. There's another piece in there that didn't get as much play, but I think it's interesting. When you think about beef, you tend to think about a steak on my plate or maybe there's a burger on my plate. But the truth is over 50% of the total beef that we saw consumed was in the form of mixed dishes. I'm talking about stews and soups and burritos and tacos and sandwiches and pasta dishes. That was the other finding - a lot of the beef that's been consumed, a majority of it, is consumed in these mixed dishes not just on a hunk of beef on the plate.
Those are really striking findings that 12% of people eat 50% of the beef. And that it's clustered in certain demographic groups! Really pretty interesting. I also am surprised by the mixed dishes because the vision of my head as we were speaking is that people eating the hamburgers and steaks and things like that. But the mixed dishes are really an interesting part of the picture. So, what do you think some of the factors are that drive meat consumption in some of these groups?
It's interesting. I think young people are more concerned about the planet in general. They are more clued to these issues and that might be part of the reason they are eating less beef. I think older people might be eating less beef because they're concerned about health issues. We haven't talked about that. There are a number of studies, and it is pretty consistent evidence showing that the connection between red and processed meats and heart disease and mortality. I think older people might be more concerned about that and therefore eating less meat. College graduates may be just understanding these connections better, possibly. That is part of it. I think men over women because there are some studies that show that meat plays into masculinity. There is also the idea that men are more willing to sacrifice animals for their own good than women are. These are some studies in the psychology of eating. We don't do this kind of work, but I think it's interesting.
From my own observations, and this is in the past more than I've seen it currently, but there was a time when the fast-food companies especially were reacting to messages that eating meat wasn't very healthy. The kinds of messages that they were putting out at the time were, don't let anybody tell you what to eat. Be a man, stand up, eat our massive burgers. I imagine that all these things are linked together, aren't they? The marketing practices, the masculinity, the imagery all of it's a pretty complicated set of topics.
It is. I think they are connected as you pointed out. That makes it all the more challenging to try to do something about it.
So, back to your study now. What do you mean by eating a disproportionate amount of beef? I think you defined it already, but is there more to say and how do you translate your research definition for the public who might be interested in their own consumption patterns?
That's an interesting point because we do our research and then we have the challenge of trying to communicate it to the public afterwards. Part of that is there are different concepts. What we do in the research setting is not necessarily related to what you would do at home. So, let me describe how that is. For example, in this study, we're looking at 24-hour recall data. This is a tool that nutritionists use to get a snapshot of what someone ate on the previous day. And they're very comprehensive. There's a whole methodology around it to get what is in that day's food intake. And that's what we have in our study here. The National Health and Nutrition Examination survey which we use is a nationally representative survey. So, we have over 10,000 adults here that we're looking at a snapshot in the day. And so, when we're trying to set up a threshold for what's disproportionate, we take a look at the dietary guidelines for Americans and translate those into one day. That's where we got these four ounces of beef more than that would be disproportionate. Then the question becomes, well, what do you do if you're a consumer? Can I eat a burger and not reach the disproportionate level? Yes, on a given day. But the way that the guidelines are set up is across a whole week. So, really the way to think about it is disproportionate in your daily life would mean eating a burger and a third or more every day, not just on a given day.
That makes perfect sense, so I appreciate that specific advice. What are the connections between consumption patterns that you're describing and agricultural emissions and climate change?
This idea of a dietary carbon footprint is what are the greenhouse gas emissions inherent in the foods you eat? It's not the eating that's the problem, it's the producing. That is where most of the emissions come from. How does eating affect emissions? If you eat less of something then the idea is that will send a signal back to producers to produce less of it. So, to the extent that emissions are coming from the production side and you are not participating in that, this would send a message to producers to produce less of it. Now if that link is broken, for example, and it can be broken, if American Beef Producers export which they do, then it doesn't help the planet. In other words, if they keep producing beef and shipping it to Indonesia or someplace else then it's not enough for us to eat less. It has to be a sort of a global effort.
It does make good sense when you state it that way that a lot of people making these kinds of changes could add up to a big difference, given the role that beef consumption is playing in agricultural impact on the climate. I appreciate you focusing on that. What would you say is the broader importance of this topic?
Diego - I think really the broader importance is to point out that beef is a really extravagant source of protein. You can get the same nutritional equivalents, even better because it doesn't come with saturated fats, not associated with cardiovascular disease to the degree that beef is. If you were to eat chicken, it’s like one-eighth or one-10th the amount of greenhouse gas emissions to produce chicken than it is beef. If you go vegetarian, even more so. I think the significance is that there are little changes that can be made that would add up. And they can come in from lots of people and they can come in lots of ways in anyone's diet.
Bio
Diego Rose is professor at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. His research explores the social and economic side of nutrition problems, with a focus on nutrition assistance programs, food security, and the food environment. He has studied disparities in access to healthy food in New Orleans and has developed a framework for how the neighborhood retail food environment influences dietary choices and obesity. His latest research projects examine grass-roots efforts to improve healthy food access in New Orleans and the environmental impacts of U.S. dietary choices. Dr. Rose has served as a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme. He teaches nutrition assessment and monitoring and food and nutrition policy. Prior to joining the faculty at Tulane, he worked for USDA’s Economic Research Service on domestic food assistance policy and in Mozambique and South Africa on food security and nutrition. He began his nutrition career as the director of a local agency WIC nutrition program in a farmworker clinic in rural California.
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The third largest food assistance program in the United States is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC for short. WIC is designed to safeguard the health of low-income women, infants, and children up to the age of five who are at risk of inadequate nutrition. WIC provides funds for specific foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating, and referrals to healthcare. However, regardless of school attendance and access to school meals, children age out of the program the month after their fifth birthday. Today, I am talking with the University of Georgia's Travis Smith, an agricultural economist who, along with his co-author, Pourya Valizedah studied the effects of aging out of WIC on children's diets.
Interview Summary
Before we discuss your recent paper, why did you decide to study aging out of WIC?
There's been a lot of work on pregnant and postpartum women participants of the WIC program, and also infants, and all of that research is definitely very important. There's been less work on child participants, and one thing we were interested in was this arbitrary rule about kids losing access to WIC in the month after they turned five years old. We knew that this rule was set up because most kids start school when they turn five, although it's not WHEN they turn five. Some previous work that I had done with my co-author Pourya on school foods, we knew that school foods really impact kids' diet quality in a positive way. We were interested in what happens to some of these kids that have this potentially long gap in their food assistance.
It's really fascinating to learn that there was a lot of research in this space on WIC oriented to mothers, and it sounds like what you're saying, little or not as much was focused on children. I'm interested to understand why do you think that's the case given the orientation of this program?
That's a great question. I think there's probably two ways to look at this. I think the most important is that most people would consider pregnant women and infancy the most vulnerable times of your life, and so understanding how the program impacts the most vulnerable would be of first order importance. Also, some of the early work that came out in the 1980s when people started really looking into the efficacy of WIC, focused on birth weights, for example, and you see that WIC's impact on low birth weights far outweighs the cost of WIC itself. For example, we're talking about women that live in low-income households, so in most cases, when these women go to give birth they most likely might be on Medicaid. Any outcome that would be a negative outcome or an adverse outcome at birth would be paid for through Medicaid. That was the first place that people looked, and that's when researchers realized very quickly that WIC is paying for itself just on the women participants and the child participants together at birth. There is definitely other research on children, it's just not as much research.
That's great. Let's go ahead and dig into the paper that was recently published in the American Journal for Agricultural Economics. What's the upshot? What did you find?
The upshot is that it seems like that WIC does work in terms of providing nutritious foods to the child participants. These are kids that are two, three, and four years old. One reason that that's important is that we know as kids age, the probability that they stay on WIC, even when they're eligible, declines dramatically. For example, at birth, as I mentioned earlier, I think the take-up rate is over 95%. That is because postpartum, immediately after birth, medical providers will give a screener at the hospital and if they see that Moms are eligible for WIC, they'll ask if you want to sign up. Part of the WIC package is to get free infant formula if the mother doesn't want to breastfeed or she's partially breastfeeding. So, you see a large uptake at that point. But then after the kid turns one and the package switches to milk and cereal and fruits and vegetables, that's where we start to see parents and caregivers not re-certify the children. Over time, by the time you get to four-year-olds, you're looking at, out of all the four-year-olds that are eligible, depends on what study you look at, but it's definitely under 50% participation, probably in the 30 to 40% range that are taking part in the program. For those that are participating, we're looking at what is being reported by the parents that the kids are actually eating. What we're finding is that foods provided through WIC, which are healthy foods, do impact foods that the kids are consuming.
This raises an important question about what you did in the study. This idea of how you describe food as nutritional or healthy - could you tell us a little bit more about how you measured diet quality? I know that there's also an interest in the quantity, so please explain.
That's right. We use this measure called the Healthy Eating Index developed by nutritionists. It gives you a score from between zero and 100, just like you'd have a test in school. The way it works is there are 13 different components, for example, one would be fruits. As you get closer to eating the recommended fruit consumption for that age group, you can score more and more points. There are other food groups such as vegetables and whole grains, etc. There are even some components that are nutrients, like saturated fats and added sugars. As you get closer and closer to the recommendations on all these different components, you get closer and closer to scoring a 100. We use this algorithm based off what the parents are reporting that the kids are eating. Then we're able to score how well they eat on this range from zero to 100. Now, I'll tell you, the scores that they're getting aren't that great, right? It's around 50 out of 100, so there's already room in improvement. This is not just for kids that are on WIC, this is in general, across all ages. Americans have a lot of room to improve their diet, and so that is our main outcome in terms of the quality. But we did also look at the quantity or the overall calories that the kids were consuming as well.
So, what you found was those kids, when they aged out of WIC, before they actually entered into school, they had lower quality diets? Was the same true with the quantity? I mean, in terms of the number of calories, could you tell us a little bit about that?
That's right. When we first looked at the sample in total, we didn't really find much of an effect of aging out of WIC program. But we were concerned whether the kids are in school or not. So, where we find the reduction in diet quality is for the kids that are born in, say the winter, late fall period. These are called late school starters. These are kids that generally are born after the cutoff date to go to kindergarten. So, for example, if a kid was born in September, they would miss the kindergarten cutoff. For most states, that would be August. So, they would lose WIC in October, and then they must wait all the way until the next school year before they would go on to most likely free school meals. We were able to split the sample into these late school starters, and then you have the other kids that are born, for example, maybe in the summer, so they would lose WIC but then could seamlessly slide into school food programs. For those kids that lose WIC and then go into the school programs, or maybe they even lose WIC while they're in school, depending on the state, we see no effects at all on the quality of their diet or the quantity of their diet. But for the kids that are these late school starters, the ones that are born in the winter or late fall, that's where we see this decline of on average of 20% decline in the quality of the food that they're consuming. But we still, for them, for those kids, we still find absolutely no effect on the quantity. What we're seeing is that parents or caregivers lose access to these nutritious foods that are being provided for free through the WIC program. But they're still feeding their kids the same number of calories. They are just switching to lower quality foods.
Is that finding true for everyone? Or are there differences in the individuals that you looked at in this study?
You can kind of imagine that if you were able to rank kids in households based on who's consuming the lowest quality diet, they would be on the very lower end of this HEI score versus kids that typically consume a much higher quality diet. They would be up higher at the end of this spectrum. This could be for a whole host of unknown reasons, right? It could just be the kids' own food preference, the household that they live in, and the parents' preference. It could be the food environment. But regardless of whatever those reasons are, what we found was that the kids that typically consume high quality diets at home, so they're on the upper end, we see really no effects for them when aging out of WIC. Where all the action is, where all the deficits and the diet quality come from are at the lower end. So, these are the most vulnerable kids that live potentially in areas with inadequate access to healthy food or whatever it may be, they're the ones that are taking the largest hit, and arguably, they're the most vulnerable.
This difference across households or across children is really important to recognize and it's an important place for interventions as we think about what the implication of your work suggests. So that's one of the questions I'm interested in understanding. What, if any, are the long-term effects of children aging out of WIC? It seems like there's a special period that this is happening. Do you think there are effects beyond that window of time before they start school?
I think that there probably are. Now, we couldn’t address that specifically in our study because of the way our study was designed. The effects that we're looking at are just for this transition when they're around the period that they're losing access around five. One reason just intuitively to kind of understand is why we can't extrapolate this out is that. As we add months past five years old, the probability that that kid is going to go into school is going to be increasing. So, you're going to start muddling the positive effects of school food programs. But to speak to these long-term effects, there's this whole long literature from nutritionists, and your listeners will probably just know this anecdotally, if you have small children or had kids or been around kids, is that it's really hard to get them to eat healthy, right? Or to try new foods. The WIC program is providing this opportunity to have access to these healthy foods, and the problem is that, I think, many people would also realize, or again, anecdotally, you would kind of realize that it's really easy for kids to have a reversion, right? You've been trying really hard, you're getting them to eat that broccoli, but then if all of a sudden you lose access to broccoli, and they say, oh, I can eat the French fries. It's really easy to go back to just eating those French fries and you take all this kind of nutrition capital, so to speak, that's been developed over these years of being on the WIC program, could quickly be wiped out. So that is a very important period. That's what the nutrition literature says. We haven't looked at these longer-term effects yet.
Well, thank you for that. Travis, it's interesting to find this idea that the calories don't change. So, if you will, the quantity doesn't change, but the mix, the nutritional value of the foods that children are eating changes if they age out of WIC. So, the question is, what challenges do you think parents are facing to continue to buy the WIC items or to buy these more nutritious foods during this age out period?
Yes, that's right. WIC is acting as a small income transfer, and so when you lose WIC, parents must then use their own money to buy food. By and large, whole grain bread, for example, will be more expensive than refined grains. Processed fruits and vegetables that may be canned that come with added syrups or fats will be cheaper than fresh produce. All these things add up when the parents are still feeding their kids the same amount of food and they're making these small substitutions for the lower quality foods. You do see that add up. I will point out that in terms of the calories, there was also another paper that came out right after our paper by Marian Bitler that showed that they were able to look at what was going on in the households. What they find is that the moms actually do reduce their own calories, which is a finding that we've seen in the context of WIC and other programs, and also, I think it seems, I guess obvious, is that the parents would be more likely to take the hit and shield their kids. Your paper doesn't speak to that, but there are these other implications for others in the household.
Wow, this is really important work. Thank you for sharing that. I'm interested in the policy shifts that could happen. How could policy change affect this issue, this problem, and the negative effects of aging out? What kind of policy tweaks are possible, and do you have a sense of the cost of that?
The obvious policy fix is to change the arbitrary rule of kids lose WIC in the month after they turn five years old, and just say, "Hey, you can stay on WIC until you get into kindergarten." We were curious about how much that would cost. We know from administrative cost data from the USDA how much it costs on average per month for a four year old to be on WIC, and so we just extrapolated that number out, assuming that births are random across the year, so that would mean you would have 1/12th of the population that would have to stay on WIC for 11 more months and then you have another 1/12th that would stay on for 10 months, and so on and so forth. We calculated the total cost of that under the current rules, and it came out to about a hundred million dollars, which sounds large, right? A hundred million dollars. But you must put that into context of the current spending. WIC currently costs about 5.7 billion, with a b, so that change comes out to about a 2% increase in the program to allow kids to stay on WIC until they turn five years old. Not only is that a small percentage of the WIC program, but that’s also less than a drop in the bucket in terms of food assistance spending. Again, to have a better context, the SNAP program costs, last year, I think it was about $120 billion, so it's actually a very small amount to allow kids to stay on the program.
Is there any political movement or any movement in the legislature to address this problem?
Somewhat. There's been a bill called the WIC Act, which would allow states to seek a waiver from the federal government to do just that: to allow kids to stay on WIC until they get into kindergarten, or they turn six, whichever comes first. This has been proposed, I think at least since 2015, over and over. It's bipartisan that has sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and it's been proposed in the House and the Senate and in both also bipartisan support. But it's never gotten out of committee, which means they sent it to committee, doesn't get marked up, and it's never left. I don't know if this year will be any different. There's been several other bills that pertained to WIC that have also been proposed. I think there's more interest in revamping WIC. Whether this will happen with this particular one, I'm not sure, because as you may know right now, Congress is asking for more money to pay for WIC because it is discretionary, it's not mandatory. So, who knows, right? But there is this proposal to allow this to happen.
Bio
Travis Smith is an associate professor at the University of Georgia, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. His research interests focus on the economics of food, health, and nutrition, with a focus on food assistance programs.
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